Making "storage" Furniture Functional!

So one of the main components in this office/playroom extravaganza obviously had to be toy storage! I mean the point of this was to get away from staring at plastic eye sores (AKA toys) right? Well the popular thing in storage now are those modular furniture/storage units. So I started craigs-listing and wal-marting with no luck, (hey my fifteen dollar budget for this one wasn't taking me very far). So as I was chatting with my mom and telling her what I was looking for guess what! She was getting rid of hers! *tadahhh!* I was so excited that I rushed over and picked it up. But as I was loading it with toys I noticed some problems.
Look, I must be a bad mom because I HATE looking at movies with open shelving!!!! *gag* I also didn't want to shove them into bins because I knew if Veda couldn't see the movie she was looking for she would rip them all out! The second problem was all of the space that VCR was taking up, with tons of room on top of it? I know, this is where you say "Then buy that poor child a DVD player! They are smaller and do not look like electronic dinosaurs!" But all of those movies you see are from when I was little, and they are VHS... Plus I think she will survive this traumatic childhood loss ;^). The third problem was that the shelves were weird shaped. No matter how I moved them I always had a tall area. Who has toys to fill that?????

So I headed to Home Depot, where I picked up a laminate shelf and some brackets. The shelf was 7 dollars and some change, and the brackets ran 2 dollars and change for all of them (You see that, I am sticking to that $15.00 a week budget like glue!) Now I could have saved more money and used scrap wood. But because all of this furniture has a pre-finish on it, it would have looked out of place even if I had painted it. All you need to do is measure your spaces, and head over to the storage area. What I bought was a stock shelf, so it is not in the lumber department. They said they don't cut things with finishes there, but a couple eye-lash bats later and it was cut ;^)

This may not seem like a big project or a big deal, but look at all of that storage I created now!!!And you can see to solve the *staring at movies* problem, I took the left over fabric from the fabulous wall art and made a cover! Right now it is just up there with double sided tape, I need to get a small tension rod. That cover took me barely five minutes, and I did not sew, just got out the trusty iron and stitch witchery
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And Tadah! I still need to get another of those storage thingys at the bottom. This tells you how cheap I am, I was ranting about the fact that those run $5.88. Eww! But oh well :^(... Those three storage bins on the mid shelf are from the Dollar Store so that makes up for it:^)

So the thing to remember is that although this new modular storage fad is convenient you can still make it even better by modifying it to fit their favorite toys!!! Happy Decorating <3