TV Cabinet Repurpose

Or Where to Put Your Yarn Stash

Hi everyone. It’s Cindy here to tell you a tale of how to make something useful after it becomes obsolete. Do you remember how huge old tube TV’s were? I’m sure some of you may still have some in your house.

Old Tube TV
(picture borrowed from the internet)

Back when tube TV’s were the only thing you could buy we purchased a cabinet for our family room to put ours in. It was perfect for the job with a large section for the TV and room for additional storage. Eventually that TV died and by that time the only TV’s you could get were the wide screen flat panel type. Since most of our TV viewing is done in the family room we didn’t want to get a small flat screen which is what we would have had to do if it was going to fit inside the cabinet.

New 42″ Wide Screen TV on top of Cabinet

Instead we opted for a 42″ wide screen TV and put it on top of the cabinet. For the past few years the part of the cabinet where the TV used to be began collecting all sorts of things.

The main items inside the cabinet were dog toys and my crochet projects. I’ve been crocheting for about 4 years now and like anyone that has a craft hobby I had started collecting a bit of a stash of yarn. Well we decided to turn the former TV cabinet into a storage cabinet for my yarn.

TV cabinet yarn storage

Charlie did a great job of making a couple of shelves and staining them to match the cabinet. Then he had the tricky job of drilling holes in the sides to hang the shelves from. The doors are actually on tracks that allowed them to slide back inside the cabinet but now those tracks are blocked by the shelves.

Upper shelf

The cabinet is about 20″ deep so it has a lot of volume. We looked around and found a couple sizes of plastic totes that fit perfectly. The top shelf allows about 9 inches from the top so the 18 quart Sterilite containers we found at Home Depot were the perfect size.

Lower shelves with large containers.

The middle shelf has about 13″ of clearance and the bottom shelf is about 12″. Again we went with a larger Sterilite container that is a 30 quart size. The large and small containers we found are perfect at about 18″ deep so there is no space wasted. I didn’t use to have all my yarn stash here but I decided to consolidate it all to one location.

What is in that green bag mom?

The yarn is mostly sorted by type of yarn but a few are separated by project.

You sure have a lot of yarn here.

In the past 4 years I’ve acquired more yarn than I have projects for right now (I know some of you crafters are snickering at reading that). Some of the yarn is left over from previous projects, some of it is for projects I’m working on now and some were bought for one purpose that may never get done. After I recently finished the holiday afghan, Charlie and I looked through a few catalogs and searched online and I bought yarn for 3 more afghans! I’m sure my fellow hookers and knitters can relate. I just couldn’t decide which one I wanted to do and was afraid (yeah sure) that I might not be able to buy the yarn and patterns if I waited.

Thanks for letting me play with this little ball of yarn.

As always, whenever I start taking pictures, Walter likes to get involved. I had a small bit of pink yarn and let him play with it.

I love my new storage cabinet. When I was filling the cabinet up it was a good time to see what I have and try to imagine new projects to work on with some of the left overs. If only the housework and other things didn’t get in the way. 😉