Turn Your Stinky Old Filing Cabinet Into a Modern Piece of Art

So I just got this cool standing desk and redesigned my entire office. It looked awesome with the exception of one sour spot: my filing cabinet. This thing was old as heck and it wasn't going to cut it for my new and improved office.

At first I planned to buy this filing cabinet which looked good enough and only costs $85. But then I thought to myself, "I'm a part of the Instructables community, surely I can do better than just buying some lame ol' filing cabinet".

I decided to refinish my filing cabinet into a cool hip filing cabinet that was better than money could buy. So that's what I did! Click the next button to follow along...

If you like this and want to learn more or see what other things I'm up to check out my website at travderose.com

1. Get some cool wood. I went to the clearance section at Ikea and bought a couple of used wooden closet doors for $12. I was also thinking that a wood film like this could work well too. It'd probably be a lot easier and quicker but you probably won't achieve the same quality. But worth thinking about. *One tip about using Ikea wood is that the edges aren't always finished so you need to be aware of that.
2. Spray paint (I used black)
3. Some cool new handles if you want. I think these twig looking handles are freaking awesome! I just painted right over my original one's though

All filing cabinets will be a little different but I'll show you how mine went along.

Remove the drawers, the drawer fronts, the top, and the wheels.

If you like this and want to learn more or see what other things I'm up to check out my website at travderose.com

Get the first coat started on your drawer fronts. You can periodically go back and do another coat while you're working on the other parts.

Use the old top as a template and cut your new piece exactly like the old piece.

I even used the original mounting hardware to attach the new top. I just drilled holes identical to the original top. It worked great!

If you like this and want to learn more or see what other things I'm up to check out my website at travderose.com

I wanted the drawer fronts to be recessed into the sides of my filing cabinet. To do this I cut the new sides slightly larger than the originals and screwed them right on top of the original sides. This way I didn't even have to worry about remounting the interior drawer slides or anything like that.

Put the drawer fronts back on and slide the drawers back in. I also put some furniture sliders underneath because I removed the wheels.

That's it! Enjoy your new filing cabinet (or should I say work of art?).

The only issue I had with mine was that I ran out of Ikea wood with useable sides. You can see the there are two holes on the top just because that was already in the wood. Not a big deal to me though.

Let me know what you think and if you do something similar in the comments!

-Trav

If you like this and want to learn more or see what other things I'm up to check out my website at travderose.com