Library card catalog cabinets installed

Do you remember those wonderful library card catalog cabinets that DD#2 and her hubby salvaged for me as an early Christmas present? I’ve been spending the last few days in my studio getting them set up and filled. I decided to replace the open cubbyholes that have been sitting next to my work area for the last six years or so. While those cubbyholes were certainly effective, they always looked messy because they were completely open, plus everything got really dusty, too. Also, there was about ten inches of tabletop in front of them, which I naturally piled high with clutter — stacks of clutter which made it impossible to easily reach the bottom cubbyholes without moving heaven and earth. Here is the “before” picture, taken Wednesday morning.

Sweet hubby moved the cubbyholes off to the side and wrestled the heavy card catalog cabinets into place. I decided not to stack them three high for now because it made the top drawers close to eye level. I figured that I would end up having to remove those top drawers every time I needed something, and that would just be annoying. I’ll try this for a while. I can always rearrange them later if I don’t like it.

Next, I spent a few hours scrubbing them all out. They had previously been used in elementary school classrooms to store crayons and glue and all kinds of other messy things. Yuk!

There are a couple of things I didn’t like about the drawers as they were. There is a bumpy groove down the center of each drawer bottom which accommodated the metal sliding stopper that held the library cards toward the front of the drawer. I didn’t like how that groove collected dirt, and I thought things would fall into the groove and get caught. Also, the sides of the drawers are not even 1-1/2″ high. So, I decided to line each drawer to cover up the groove and make the sides taller. I used simple manila folders, cut and folded to fit, to make the liners. Now the sides of my drawers are 3″ high, which means I can stuff more things into them without worrying that my treasures might fall out.

Yesterday I moved things over from the previously beloved cubbyholes to their new homes in the drawers. Now I have forty-five, wonderful, 15″ long drawers instead of all those 12″ cardboard boxes. This gives me more room to store things and less room on the tabletop in front of the drawers for clutter to pile up. Someday I promise I will conquer clutter!

So here’s the “after” picture. What a difference! I LOVE IT!