Upcycle an Ugly Cube to a Classy Console

When I first moved into my new house, I bought a Martha Stewart cube storage unit for my front entry.  You know the one I mean?  It's not the most attractive piece of furniture by a long shot, but it does the job for a reasonable price.

Now that I have my beadboard feature wall in the front entry, I don't really need that storage unit anymore.  It wound up in my den alongside all the other mismatched and unused pieces that I don't really know what to do with.   The poor thing sat there, unused and ignored, until I decided this past weekend to give it a makeover.

Here is the before shot:

Basic and kind of ugly with those drawer thingys...

Here's the full-on view Ya, well, it needs work...


I turned it on its side, added 36" 1x2 legs and 1x2 cross-piece centered on the bottom for bracing (not shown).  I topped it with a piece of maple plywood as well.


I used primed, fingerjointed pine for the legs and support pieces because I planned to paint the whole thing, but then I decided to use maple veneer on the sides of the piece:

So I used a Minwax Dark Oak stain instead and top coated with a water based poly.

Remember the ugly drawer thingys?? I have a sheet of 1/4" maple veneer.  I used the drawer as a template and cut two squares out with my circular saw.  I sanded the edges with a sanding sponge to make them nice and smooth and glued them to the fronts of the two largest bins.  I had two cute handles in my stash, so I drilled holes right through the veneer and the bin (helps to secure the panel to the front as well) and now those bins look like real drawers.

In fact, that process went so well that I measured the sides and cut two more pieces of veneer that I glued and nailed into place.  Then I stained all the veneer to match the top piece.  I added some felt "feet" to the bottom of the legs to avoid scratches on my wood floor.

Voila!  Now this sad little MS cast off is a thing of beauty! The perfect console table with storage and it's now counter height as well -  I love it!!

Cheers!

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