I wonder if there is anything in the English language that excites a girl’s heart like the words, “frugal storage.”

Well, maybe the words “dark chocolate.” Haha! =) You get the idea though, we are all suckers for storage!

Think of how a woman responds to a walk-in closet. Be still my heart!

When we were house hunting two years ago, we toured a house that had a butler’s pantry right off of the kitchen. I’m not gonna lie, I could have bought the whole house on that one merit. Never mind the rest of the house was in major need of some work. It had a butler’s pantry! Ah! Thankfully, God had other plans and blessed us with our wonderful house in the country! (You can read about that here.)

Creating Frugal Storage Solutions in our New House

Although this house has great closets in all of the bedrooms, we have had to come up with some furniture pieces to provide storage solutions elsewhere. I have an old TV cabinet that has a new life as a pantry in my kitchen. We also have a dresser that is now a media cabinet in our living room. For some reason, the drawers of the dresser were always coming off the tracks. There were several times when the drawers seemingly jumped out and became a real safety hazard for our little ones. So, we took out the drawers and my husband installed shelves. He painted the inside black so that all those ugly media components would blend into the background. It was a great solution that has worked well for us.

A Set of Drawers for Future DIY Projects

I told my husband to hold on to those drawers because I was sure I could come up with some DIY project for them. I had them stacked in a corner for a long time and my husband staked claim to them to store his tools. However, he has recently been forced to relocate as I have finally found a new purpose for them.

Creating a Bookshelf for our Homeschool Classroom

Recently, we embarked on a new adventure. We started homeschooling. It’s still crazy to think about, especially considering we just dropped this little bombshell of an idea–both on ourselves and our children–right in the middle of the school year. There was not a huge amount of time to prepare and I found myself in desperate need of some storage solutions in our sun-room-turned-classroom. Here is where those old drawers came on to the scene. They have been given a new lease on life as a book shelf for all of our home school books and supplies!

It became a really cool project for the boys, and we all worked together to complete it. We took out all the hardware, stacked them one on top of the other, and screwed them all snugly together. I paid $3 and some change for a 1x3x8 piece of pine, and the boys cut them into pieces to place in the front of the drawer to hold in the books. They had so much fun doing this and they are learning how to be handy. You’re welcome, future daughters-in-law! Haha! I hope you enjoy this little project to create frugal storage!

Let us know if you try something similar. God bless! ~Shanna