Saturday, June 18, 2011

The Man Cave aka our library

Husband and little man have been working diligently in our libary that is slowly turning into "The Man Cave". While there won't be any wall space left for poster of dubious artistic value and other dorm-style masculine paraphernalia thanks to our sheer wealth in books, it's definitely the one room where man reigns supreme ... and I don't mind at all, especially since I got to pick the wall color.

One caveat I tossed at my men before they got too carried away was the question of storage. Not only do we have a bunch of books, we also have a slew of board games that need to be contained. We agreed that a regular dresser would occupy too nmuch visual space and make the room appear even smaller what with the shelves loaded with books and reaching the ceiling, so we had to come up with another solution.

A trip to the local Habijax store offered us a clever solution: a wall cabinet! Wall cabinets aren't as deep as base cabinets and dressers and still offer plenty of storage. Just by adding legs and a countertop we could create exactly what we needed for this room.

We bought the 60'' long cabinet, strapped it to the roof of the Jeep and took it home.



[Step 1: An upside down cabinet with tools and the first leg of four!]




We picked up 4 wooden legs at the big box store (I forgot whether it was orange or blue) . These already come with a screw attached so all you have to do is drill a hole into the cabinet where you want the leg to go and screw it in. A bit of woodglue helps firm up that joint. There are plenty of leg designs available - husband settled for a simple chunky square leg (I'd have picked a curvy turned leg but I guess that's the girl in me) . If it hadn't been for the very tall base modling I'd have simply screwed the cabinet to the wall and skipped the feet, creating a floating cabinet and avoid having to clean around legs.






[Step 2: Flip cabinet over and maneuver into place]




You can see how perfectly it fits into the space. There's maybe 1/2 inch on either side to spare!


After that, the men decided a change of order was in order and started working on the shelves that they were going to install about the cabinet.






They moved into the back yard, broke out the saw horses and power tools




And went to work!








1 comment:

  1. I love this idea. We have an extra bedroom we aren't planning on using so I may steal this. Can't wait to see pics of when you're all done!

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