Our house has an upstairs loft area that when we moved in designated as the kids play room. We put an old couch that we had, put a small TV and the X-Box in the room, then dropped off all of the boxes that had been labeled with the kids toys from the last 2 moves.
This was an unorganized mess that was uninviting, and just an eye sore. I got tired of it and started thinking about ways to make the room more inviting. I turned the couch, and realized the room needed an "entertainment" center of sorts. Off to Pinterest I went. I found this Pintrest storage idea
I stared at this for a couple weeks and decided that I didn't like the tote look at all. I had recently built a couple cabinet drawers for my workbench that I was very happy with the way they turned out so I decided to use the same principle for those drawers to replace the totes. I printed out some papers, made a cut list, decided that I wanted it to be deeper since I was building my own drawers and off I went to the local big box lumber store to grab some wood.
I got back to my garage and started working.
It didn't take me long to realize that I wanted it different. Here is a video from the early stage where I completely went off script.
As you can see my rebellious ways of not following the directions started coming together. I decided to go with hardwood on hardwood for the drawer sliders. I have a rather large assortment of milled mesquite and pecan at my disposal so fabricated some mesquite slides for the drawers to sit on. I then took the underside of the drawers where they would rest on the mesquite and sanded them down smooth, and added a little wax to make them as smooth as butter on a bald monkey.
Going off no plans meant I needed to do some clean up. As you can see from this photo the drawers fit, but there is zero clearance. Not what you want, so out came the belt sander to remove some excess wood.
I decided that this project would be great with chalkboard paint. After all it is an "entertainment" center for the kids, and they love chalk. A run back to the hardware store and some guidance from the warden on the color the cabinet became this color. But it needed some trim so I went to Facebook for an informal poll asking should the trim be pink or yellow. Yellow overwhelmingly won, and its good because it was probably going to be yellow regardless, cause well, I like yellow.
My oldest daughter loves to paint and do crafts so I enlisted (she wanted to) her assistance on picking out trim and painting.
The drawers are so big. Perfect for stashing toys, and keeping the playroom tidy.
Check out the amazing drawer pulls that I grabbed from my favorite online shopping site with free 2 day shipping. Came in a package of 12 (exactly what I needed) for about $10.
The finished project sat in the garage for a couple days till Christmas Eve (cause thats when I was able to get Chris to come over and help me carry it upstairs :-)
I am so happy with the way it all came out. The upstairs loft is really coming together.
Now I need to build an actual desk to give them a study area, and replace the little table behind the couch. But thats another project, and maybe another post.
