Remember this beauty? After casually looking for an old card catalog for over a year, we finally found her at an antique store. This piece of furniture is no joke, y'all. It's actually three separate sections of 15 drawers a piece (plus the legs and the pull-out shelf inserts) that easily stack on top of one another. And it is really well-made. Everything is solid wood and the joints are even dove-tailed. So beautiful. Except for the finish. We weren't crazy about the honey-colored wood.
So we re-stained it. And we went the lazy way: a gel stain instead of sanding, re-staining and sealing each surface. We used Minwax Gel Stain, in hickory. All you do is brush it on (we used a foam craft brush) in a thin coat and let it dry. Disclaimer: the directions say to wipe it off with a rag a couple minutes after you brush it on, but this didn't work for us at all. We were wiping away all the color. So we just decided to not wipe, and it worked just fine. You can still see the grain of the wood and with a top coat of clear poly, it's actually quite durable. We certainly hope so; we imagine this baby will in the family for generations :)
So, what are we using those 45 drawers for, you ask? Well, being the nerds we are, it's our alphabetized small-item storage system. Each drawer is labeling (in alphabetical order) and all the small knick-knacks that end up in random corners of our house are collected, stored and ready to retrieved. For instance, "where's my flask?", Jake might ask. "Under F", we can now confidently answer. A lot of people are surprised that we have enough small random items to fill a card catalog. Well, we do.
For instance, under "F" we have flashlights, a flask, flashcards and fly traps. Under "T" we have tape, thumb drives and a guitar tuner.
Some drawers contain only one type of item (like charges and cameras); they get their own label.
We like to think Mr.bDewey himself would approve. He was, after all, all about finding exactly what you need with ease. Sort of.
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