On of our relatives was removing some pretty ugly but solid office cabinets that were used as part of a home office in their house, but were no longer needed and taking up too much room. At the time we were relenting slightly in our original intent to not have much storage space in the house so as to avoid the clutter problems that seem to come with having lots of storage space. That is, if you have the space, you will always fill it, and if its not there you will just not allow the stuff to accumulate. This is the approach we prefer to take. In the end we had no space for towels and bedclothes, the sort of stuff that typically fills a “hot press” in Irish nomenclature. These ugly office cabinets, with a little reworking and liberal coating with our leftover bamboo flooring, became our indulgent storage area, and we liked how they turned out. One cabinet, dropped on its side became the low presses (r.h.s. of the image). The internal shelves were reworked to form dividers and new shelves within each press. Then new doors were added in bamboo ply to match the flooring, and managing to reuse the 6 original hinges. Then the other double cabinet with a little reworking became the upright presses. No ingenuity here really but a good solution to meet our needs which stopped these cabinets going into a skip. door knobs were from Ikea.

The bamboo plywood is a really beautiful material when varnished and is easy to work with. It was supplied by these people:

www.bamboo.ie