Repurposed Cabinet

I have lots of stuff.....lots of stuff!!  And, I love cabinets with lots of little drawers, which works out great because I need them to store all my stuff! :)  So, I found a project to help with this....

 

Sadly, my Granny passed away in June of 2011.  She was a "collector" of lots of things!  She was a teacher, so she had lots of school stuff - books, crafts, and other stuff that she could never stand to get rid of.  She was an artist in many different ways - but, she loved quilting and painting most.  She liked teaching quilting classes, spent hours and hours reading through quilting books/patterns, and working through small projects.

Granny with my youngest Son - Thanksgiving 2010

When she passed away, my Mom and her sisters began sorting through her house.  My husband and I traveled back to her house to help them load up some moving trucks.  It was an exhausting weekend!!  We were planning on leaving behind this old metal cabinet full of dust sitting on the side of the garage.  We had some room left in the moving truck, and I had a big idea to paint it and clean it up to put in my little studio in my basement.  So we loaded it up and it came home with me!

My husband and I took it all apart (well...mainly my husband)!  We cleaned it up, drawer by drawer...  It took a lot of time to take all the little drawer pulls off - spray paint them and add them back on to the drawers.  I used a metallic silver spray paint for these:

We also painted each drawer and the outside cabinets with white spray paint. You can see from this photo we had quite an operation going in our garage.  (These are horrible photos that I just took with my cell phone!)

And, here's the finished product!

I am so upset that I didn't take a before photo so that you could really appreciate the transformation.  But, imagine a dirty, rusty, and matte gray version of the above.  I decided to put it in my "studio" and store all my scrapbooking stickers by categories, like Christmas, Halloween, July 4th, Summer, etc.

Took a while to get them all arranged and the drawers labeled - but, I am feeling very, very organized now!  As you pull the drawer open, the front drops for easy access to the contents.  I think the cabinet was originally used to store 8 1/2" by 11" sheets of paper - maybe handouts in school or something like that.  

It was a lot of work, but I love it!  And, I'm so glad that I decided to throw it in that moving truck.  I'm sure Granny would be glad to see it being used!!  :)