Furniture Idea: Wood Cabinets

Mary Carol Garrity’s post on the Nell Hill’s blog this week is about big, wooden cabinets.

Not the installed-in-the-kitchen kind, but the freestanding furniture kind.

She says she includes them in every interior design plan she does because:

1. You can put them anywhere.(Even laundry rooms and bathrooms if yours have enough wall space. Sadly, mine don’t.)
2. They come in every imaginable style.
3. You can fill them with goodies.

I say yes, yes, and yes! I’m a big wooden cabinet fan.

I think we’ve established that Tom is a good sport when it comes to my furniture adventures, but that was never more true than when I found this pine hutch on Craigslist.

It was 3 hours away in Nixa, MO and I emailed him a picture of it and asked: if I wanted to buy this could you come up with a way to get it home? 

He rented a cargo van(!) and we drove to Nixa to check out a hutch I had only seen in pictures. Luckily I loved it, so the cargo van was not for nothing.

Tom claims he enjoyed that trip – that it was an adventure – which I sincerely hope is true, because heaven knows I’ve provided him with other similar adventures since. Although none requiring a cargo van or three hour drive.

This cabinet in my office came out of my grandma’s kitchen, back in the day when kitchens didn’t have built-in cabinets so much as freestanding furniture.

It looks like it was at one time painted an aqua color and I know that sometime after that my Aunt Mary painted it dark green. You can still see those two colors inside.

My mom pulled it out of my grandma’s basement and painted the outside white. I think she’s the one who added the chicken wire too.

See that little groove below the handle? That came from my grandparents and aunts and uncles using the drawer pull as a pop bottle opener.

There’s another groove under the other handle and I absolutely love them.

Another recent Craigslist find was this armoire for our master bedroom.

I had been looking for one for a while because we’re TV-in-the-bedroom people.

I know that’s not popular to admit, but what can I say?

I’m a news junkie, and when there’s a big story I watch the coverage like I’m being paid to, even if that means late into the night.

And sometimes those KU basketball games come on at 8pm, for heaven’s sake, and it’s the middle of winter and dark outside so the only logical place to watch them is from under the covers.

And you don’t think I’m going to watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills out in the open in the family room where everyone can see how completely ridiculous that show is, do you?

Because the armoire was replacing a dresser, I waited until I found one with several drawers so we wouldn’t be sacrificing much drawer space. And I jumped on this one when it popped up because I loved it’s color and lines and hardware. It makes me so happy to have those doors closed when we’re not watching TV. It makes the room feel more grown up somehow.

And finally, the weekend after Thanksgiving I bought this cabinet with glass doors at an estate sale and put it in the most impossible-to-photograph place in my house: a little sliver of hallway outside our master bedroom.

That’s the space I had in mind for it when I brought it home and – because it’s so slim – it fit there perfectly.

And circling back around to Mary Carol Garrity, it wasn’t long after I brought this cabinet home, that I was going through my pictures of her fall open house and spotted this one of hers.

I didn’t remember her cabinet when I ran across mine, but maybe it was floating around in my subconscious somewhere.

I love how her cabinet is not carefully styled, but full of books put in all willy nilly. That looks like a real book lover’s cabinet right there.

And I also love that she leaves the book jackets on her books.

We’re going to have to talk about books with or without book jackets here sometime. It’s a pretty pressing issue, don’t you think?