Ikea Hack: Functional Filing, Finally!

There may be no Random Round Up this week (I've been seriously slacking in the photo taking department), but I do have something: My very own Ikea hack.

Ikea hacks (any hack, really) are always so fascinating to me. I love the idea of taking something you already have and turning it into something better, more useful, or prettier. The really great ones always give me a little pang of jealously too; Why couldn't I come up with that?!

Well, my time has come. Enter an old Ikea three-drawer cabinet on casters. I always referred to it as 'the file cabinet', but that's where the functionality stops. I've had it for about 10 years, and every time a piece of paper came through that was deemed important, in it went. In a pile. In a drawer.

Those ten years of crap had added up - evidenced by the archeological dig-like cleaning process - and it was time to make this guy actually useful. First, determining how to deal with the too-shallow-to-hold-files drawers (why?! why make a file cabinet that can't hold files?!).

Not even as tall as a standard Sharpie.

I easily popped out the bottom of the middle drawer, making it
a single drawer twice as deep when used in tandem with the bottom drawer.

Then an unplanned for problem: The files were too narrow for the drawers. News flash: If something requires me leaving my house, I'll pretty much try anything to make that not happen. So what's a girl to do? Why, bust out the handsaw on the kitchen floor and tear apart that old drawer bottom I knocked out.

Way too narrow for the drawer width - Nothing for the files to hang from!

I measured the space I needed to fill and sliced off two pieces of the drawer bottom.

A few small nails in each side, and my drawer was now the perfect file width.

What I didn't show was the last step: Affixing a small bracket (similar to this) on the inside of the two drawers so they both pull out simultaneously. The cabinet still looks exactly the same from the outside - A simple three-drawer cabinet. But inside, oh the functionality!

Presto! The files now hang down into the bottom drawer. Plenty of space!

Pre-bracket adding: Now the two drawer fronts line up with eachother
and pull out and push in with just a tug of the center drawer handle.

The entire project took under an hour, and the bulk of my time was spent wrangling that dang hand saw. If you had something electric or scrap wood that was the already right size (or, ahem, files that fit because you measured first like a smartypants), you could get this done in 20 minutes or less.

I never thought I'd use 'file cabinet' and 'magical' in the same context, but it really has been a pretty wonderful experience to be able to give some paper piles a home. I'm almost looking forward to next tax season so I can smugly go pull all our documents at once from their neat little stash. Almost.