Clever Ideas for Reusing Old Drawers

Posted on 06/10/2015

Best Ways to Repurpose Dresser Drawers

You are currently in the middle of house clearance and the process has stopped as you have reached an old dresser or drawer cabinet. You don’t want it there as you will be placing a new wardrobe or cabinet there and you have no further use for it as it doesn’t fit anywhere else. Does that mean throw it out entirely and add it to the skip hire heap, though? Definitely not. At least, not the whole of it. You might not see it at first, but drawers can be of much more use than you think. How, you ask? Well, read on.

• Drawers as shelves
Turn a drawer on its side and hang it on a wall and voila, you now have a shelf. That was easy, right? And the options you have with such shelves are numerous. You can use them for books, you can use them for clutter, or you can place them in your kids’ room as a shelf for their toys. If you are more artsy, polish and paint the drawer and you have even more options. Make a vintage shelf for old photos or sentimental items, or make a vibrant shelf for flower pots. If you thing you can nail them down well enough, you don’t even have to turn them bottom-side-to-the-wall. You can create your very own protruding shelves that will look like they are sticking out of the wall.

• Drawers as flower pots
You can use them in your house or spread them around your garden as custom-made flower pots. All you need to do is make holes at the bottom for drainage, and fill them with fertile soil and the basic work is complete! You can now start planting and watering. And if the new pot seems too plain to you, you can paint it, polish it, add decorations and whatever else you want to create a beautiful square pot. Sounds much better than a heap for waste removal, right?

• Drawers as pet beds
Yes, instead of going to the store to buy an expensive house or a comfortable bed that your cat will be too busy sneering at to lie down in, you can simply take a drawer and add a blanket or a cushion. Now your pet has somewhere to sit and lie down in or harass and rough up and destroy – and then you can finally add the drawer to the rubbish clearance pile. Alternatively, you can take two wooden planks and create a playground for your cats by nailing the drawers together as they face different directions. If your cat simply passes it, too baffled by its existence to do anything with it, you can just use it as an eccentric shelf case for a variety of things.

• Drawers as wall mirrors
The inside of the drawer can be substituted for a mirror and after you hang it on a wall, you will have both a mirror, and a shelf for makeup, toothpaste, or shaving supplies. This mirror shelf is perfect for a bathroom as it will replace the need for a wall cabinet.

• Drawers as a bulletin / message board
And you can also hang a drawer on the wall and use the convenient material of its bottom part to pin photos, news, messages for the family or anything else. You don’t even have to keep the plain brown or white colour, you can add a fabric or a paper to make it more colourful or artsy. It’s something both convenient, pretty, and useful for when you want to leave notes for somebody.

All these are just part of the ideas that you can get while pondering what to do with old drawers. The best answer for that question is, don’t leave them for junk disposal, they are definitely not useless rubbish. They are as useful as your imagination will allow them to be, so stir it hard and stir it well, and see what it offers you and your old drawers.