The Story Of A Hoarder's Card Catalog And How We Turned It Into The Most Awesome Piece Of Furniture(With Photos)
How did we get here?
My wife and I are walking home from a nice dinner when we pass by an old brownstone with a front patio. Sitting in the middle, alone on the concrete, is the large, fairly ugly, two tiered brown card catalog you see to the left.
I am smitten by it. Something about a card catalog seems to embody potential. After all, anything could be inside all those drawers.
For all I knew each and every drawer could be filled with fingers, or gold coins - anything is possible with so many drawers.
I see this card catalog and I am overcome by a purchasing desire. I have to know more. So I leave my wife on the sidewalk and knock. A man answers. Immediately upon him opening the door it is apparent he is at least a hoarder, possibly a lunatic.
His apartment is a dark cave of carpeting, boxes and artisanal German beer mugs. Another man, totally silent, stares, without looking back at us, at a television.
It is clear to me I should not buy this card catalog from this man. My theory about fingers has gained significant traction. At a minimum the insides of the cabinet will definitely be filled with spiders and bed bugs. I am preparing to leave.
"I'll give it you for $200"
"I'll take it!"
About a year passes. The albatross of the card catalog sits in our living room.
My wife and I move into our new apartment. We have very little kitchen prep space and an old card catalog. The time for a phoenix-like rebirth has come!
I can report that the card catalog did not turn out to be filled with (too many) spiders, nor did it have a single bed bug.
To be totally safe, I paid a company to gas it, along with all our belongings, when we moved, in a terrible, Earth destroying gas I can no longer remember the name of but which kills all multi-cellular life.
Now, in our new home, we prepare for the card catalog's rebirth! We take off all the old metal parts and find that they are real brass!
What follows is a week of meticulous hand polishing. You haven't lived until you've gone through 400 Q-Tips and two bottles of "Brasso" on a plastic tarp on your living room floor.
We gave the wood a new light blue spray paint coat, added four pin legs to the bottom, and leveled the two tiers out. The result was pretty striking.
But we were not done yet.
The point wasn't just to make the card catalog pretty, but also practical. For that, we needed a work space. So it was time for a butcher block.
I toyed with the idea of making my own butcher block, maybe on our balcony or in a maker's space somewhere in Brooklyn for $6,000,000,000,000,000 a month. But in the end I decided against this. I also thought of buying a hoyty Brooklyn butcher block for the blood price of my first born.
But, in the end, I found a nice carpenter from the midwest who shipped a real pretty, hard maple, edge grain, custom sized butcher block out to NYC for a few hundred bucks.
The end result has served us well for several years and, we hope, for a lifetime longer. The area around the catalog has also been redone, which I will detail in another post. But here's the final piece of furniture.
To be totally honest, this thing is one of our prized possessions now. Everyone who sees it loves it and we use it every, single day.
Plus, we've filled every drawer with a wide array of different contents. By "wide-array" of course I don't mean fingers. There are hardly any fingers in those drawers.
Very nice
Lovely pieces of furniture.Thnks for sharing with us
Thanks!
Now that has turned into one unique piece of house bling! Kuddos on you for seeing the potential!
Yeah - even my wife was super dubious when I insisted we buy it - but it
Awesome! It's the best to buy furniture off the side of the street, I've scored several comfortable chairs that way.
Do you find chose card catalogue cubbies too small for a lot of stuff? That would be my only worry.
You know, they are amazingly spacious actually - the actual space is significantly larger than the fronts of the cabinets indicate - so we have some drawers postively stuffed
Very nice work @dber. I love old things and what a great way to make it functional.
Thanks man -it turns out to fit our place like a glove too, which is lucky.
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Okay @dber ... This post was so creative and fun to read. You're not just a craftsman, but a wordsmith. Kudos on a great post!
Much appreciated!
It's always a treat to find someone who's got a creative slant to stuff. Following of course. :)
Actual Question: Do those hairpin legs wobble at all? I wonder about the stability with that kind of leg design, especially when mixing a big bowl or kneading or chopping. If you like them, where did the legs come from?
Also good call on ordering the butcher block, I tried making small ones in my apartment years ago, and it was a huge mess - tons of work without the right power tools.
It took some