My kids are clothes stuffers. You give them a pile of clothes, pre-folded and ready to be put away, and guaranteed, the clothes would end up stuffed somewhere. I suppose this is ok, but the dressers we had we $100 Sauder "some assembly required" dressers. The sides are press board, the bottom is a different kind of press board. This is perfectly fine for someone like me. I set clothes in, the drawers open and close, no problems.
For my kids, who can't stop stuffing, the bottom of the drawers inevitably fall out the bottom. The kids end up stuffing more until the drawer one below opens at the same time as the one that is stuffed overfull. For a while, I was taking broken drawers and using a liberal amount of Gorilla Glue to the drawer to hold it together. This generally works well until they stuff and break the bottom by breaking one of the sides of the drawer. That usually ends the life of that drawer.
With the baby coming, we needed another dresser. I had a plan to build a 'stuff proof' dresser, over engineering the thing to handle any amount of clothes they could try to throw at it. I had a definite design in my head, and I figured that I could make the sides of the dresser a little bit different for each dresser that I made. I planned to put a little bookshelf on top of the dresser with a couple of shelves for the girls to put books on.
At the end of May, I got side tracked by a project down the street. By the time that project was done, I didn't have time to make a dresser. Tara and I spent some time going to different stores looking to find a dresser to purchase, even if it meant the same kind of dresser we already had. We couldn't find any. Most 'some assembly required' dressers these days are only 3 1/2 feet tall, with three drawers in them. Not what we were looking for. Pre-built dressers were the same size, but three times the cost.
For my kids, who can't stop stuffing, the bottom of the drawers inevitably fall out the bottom. The kids end up stuffing more until the drawer one below opens at the same time as the one that is stuffed overfull. For a while, I was taking broken drawers and using a liberal amount of Gorilla Glue to the drawer to hold it together. This generally works well until they stuff and break the bottom by breaking one of the sides of the drawer. That usually ends the life of that drawer.
With the baby coming, we needed another dresser. I had a plan to build a 'stuff proof' dresser, over engineering the thing to handle any amount of clothes they could try to throw at it. I had a definite design in my head, and I figured that I could make the sides of the dresser a little bit different for each dresser that I made. I planned to put a little bookshelf on top of the dresser with a couple of shelves for the girls to put books on.
At the end of May, I got side tracked by a project down the street. By the time that project was done, I didn't have time to make a dresser. Tara and I spent some time going to different stores looking to find a dresser to purchase, even if it meant the same kind of dresser we already had. We couldn't find any. Most 'some assembly required' dressers these days are only 3 1/2 feet tall, with three drawers in them. Not what we were looking for. Pre-built dressers were the same size, but three times the cost.
After wandering around for a week trying to find something, I had an idea. I got metal shelving, and some laundry baskets, and made a makeshift dresser. It's nice and tall, and has tons of space. The kids can generally see the clothes, which is nice for them, and as you can see from the picture above, they continue to stuff, but it doesn't matter. (The clothes in these baskets was nicely folded and put away two weeks ago, but it doesn't take long to end up all over the place, I guess.) They can stuff these as much as they want, I don't see them breaking the baskets any time soon. Each shelf is rated for 350 pounds, so they can stuff full of chain mail if they want, and it still should be fine.
I liked the thing enough to make four of these. We found the baskets at Walmart. We cleaned out three different Walmarts here in the valley of this type of basket, and still needed about 6 more. A week later, one of them had 4 of them. I took them. Then another had 10 of them, I only bought two. I took secret pleasure in screwing up Walmart's inventory system around here by creating a one man run on the product, then having Walmart over stock the things, and I won't be buying any more. (I bought 16 of them in total.) Now, any time I go to Walmart in the next two months, I plan to walk by the laundry baskets, and if they have 8-10 of these on the shelf, I will just laugh to myself.
I gave Drew three old dressers with the remaining drawers. Hopefully he was able to build one good one, and hopefully his kids are not stuffers...
I liked the thing enough to make four of these. We found the baskets at Walmart. We cleaned out three different Walmarts here in the valley of this type of basket, and still needed about 6 more. A week later, one of them had 4 of them. I took them. Then another had 10 of them, I only bought two. I took secret pleasure in screwing up Walmart's inventory system around here by creating a one man run on the product, then having Walmart over stock the things, and I won't be buying any more. (I bought 16 of them in total.) Now, any time I go to Walmart in the next two months, I plan to walk by the laundry baskets, and if they have 8-10 of these on the shelf, I will just laugh to myself.
I gave Drew three old dressers with the remaining drawers. Hopefully he was able to build one good one, and hopefully his kids are not stuffers...
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