This Besta is the best-a!

The dining room saga continues!  When I last posted about this re-do, our house contained lots of extraneous furniture and about 18 IKEA boxes.  Indeed, it was difficult to navigate around our tiny 2bedroom for the past week and a half or so.  As you can see from this picture, about a week ago we had painted the dining room, but we still had all the old furniture in there:

Not that this furniture looked bad with the new color, but both the cabinet and the console table went up on Craigslist in order to make room for Besta cabinets we had in all those boxes around our house.  DH and I were pretty motivated to reduce the chaos that is produced when a tiny house has twice as much furniture as it need, so we got started asap on installing the Besta cabinets.  As you may have seen in the “sneak peek” from last week, this is what we purchased from IKEA:

This configuration is two double cabinets, and includes two drawers and both solid and glass doors.  We also purchased some mirrored inserts, which comes with glass shelves, for the upper area of the cabinets.  Initially it didn’t take very long to put these cabinet frames together, but I knew better than to think it would be that easy.  Once the frames were assembled, the bulk of our time was spent building the drawers, installing all those doors (there are 6!), and deciding where to put all the shelves.  It took us a couple of evenings, but we finally got everything assembled!

Certainly we’re not done arranging everything, and these cabinets will definitely need some hardware (they are pretty much impossible to open without pulls of some kind, and this series doesn’t come with any), but you can definitely see just how much storage we’re getting out of these beauties!  I keep putting stuff in them and they just keep gobbling everything up!  We have about twice as much storage now as we did with the old set up and although I’m sure I’ll eventually figure out where to put everything, right now I’m still in shock.  Most of this space is still empty!  But the glorious thing is that so are the usual clutter spots in the dining room.  A sure sign that we now have adequate storage in that room!

Once things settle down a bit I’ll post about our organization scheme for the space.  Right now, for example, I need to think about what I need to be able to access easily vs. what can go in the less accessible spots–the less accessible spots being those that will eventually have the banquette seating in front of them (as you can see in my planned new layout for the room):

Our next steps for the room include adding hardware (I’m hoping for something pretty shiny and fancy to dress up the IKEAness of these cabinets), getting the banquette in place (it is schedule to arrive soon), and finding an inexpensive round pedestal table that I can refinish to replace the huge dining room table that is currently in the space.  Time to get to work!