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Finding Secondhand Cabinets For $6

Last weekend we journeyed two hours north to Arlington, Virginia so Clara could have some quality time with her cousin Elsa (and apparently so my cousin Travis and I could rock some daddy-plaid, shorts, flip flops, and matching Kettler bikes together (the latter of which were both his, found for a huge deal on craigslist).

6Dollar Clara And Elsa

While there, Elsa’s mom, Cat (who is Sherry’s BFF that we introduced to my cousin back in 2007 – and now they’re married with two kids) took us to this cool shop in Old Town, Alexandra called Red Barn Mercantile. It had tons of beautiful stuff, but what caught our eye most was this bowl of vintage printing press letters.

6Dollar C At Store

Six bucks later we snagged a “C” so that Clara can be now represented amongst our original collection of letters and numbers (7, J, S, L, O, V, E). The first three were purchased at a NYC flea market just weeks after we started dating on 7/7/05 (which explains our love of the number 7) and the last four came from a flea market in DC a few years later. We also looked for a “B” for Burger, but they only had lowercase ones (which just look like a “d” instead, since they’re backwards). Sorry Burgs! The search for an uppercase B continues…

6Dollar C With Friends

But that’s admittedly not that amazing as $6 purchases go. It was actually our other $6 find on that trip that we’re still pinching ourselves about. You ready for this jelly?

Six dollars got us more than just this cabinet hardware…

6Dollar Just Hardware

…it even got us more than this whole cabinet…

6Dollar Just One Cabinet

…it actually got us SIX CABINETS. All for just six measly dollars. Not each. Total.

6Dollar All Six Cabinets

If you’re in as much disbelief as I was when Sherry first told me about her find (Clara was napping in the car, so I stayed outside with her and Sherry went in and called me with the details), here’s some proof:

6Dollar 1 Dollar Price Tag

We found them at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Alexandria (sooooo glad we decided to swing by there while visiting the area) and they truly were just selling them for a dollar each. Apparently they were once nightstands at a hotel. The hotel donated a truckload of them and the ReStore had finally gotten rid of them all (priced at $15 each)… until some overzealous purchaser brought back a bunch that he had leftover. So the ReStore guy told us they priced them at just $1 to get rid of them quickly (they already made their money we assume, since they have a No Refund policy).

Oh and for anyone worried about bedbugs, I’m an obsessed checker-outer due to a life-changing encounter with them back in NYC, so I frantically looked over every inch of them like a paranoid weirdo before taking them home (and then did another thorough check once at home, just to be sure). You can read about that harrowing NY experience here. When it comes to what I look for, I’ve learned that bed bugs are visible to the naked eye, so you should be able to see them and their droppings if you look everything over and check cracks & crevices. They also don’t like slick surfaces like glossy cabinets or plastic bags and prefer softer things like mattresses and upholstery where they can more easily walk, along with dark crevices where they can lurk/hide/ruin your life. So when buying something with more places to hide than cabinets (like an upholstered armchair) you’ll want to be extra careful – but you should still see some evidence of them in the form of small little stains on the upholstery, usually along the seams – which are (shudder) their droppings. You can also leave things in a holding area like a garage or sunroom for a day or two and recheck them again before bringing them inside.

And speaking of getting them home, miraculously we could fit two into our Altima – even with all of our travel gear like a pack & play, a dog crate, a baby in a big ol’ carseat, a husband, a wife, etc (one cabinet fit in the trunk and the other sat in the front seat while Sherry rode in the back with the Burger, the bean, the pack & play, and the folded up dog crate). The ReStore held the others since my dad was serendipitously going to be in the same area for a meeting (he drives a Honda Pilot so the remaining four fit nicely inside). We’re usually the suckers without any means to get big things anywhere (especially when we’re so far away from home), so it was a nice change of pace. I guess these $6 cabinets were just meant to be ours…

6Dollar Receipt

Well, as evidenced above, they actually cost us $6.30 with tax. So I guess it was the best six dollars and thirty cents that we ever spent.

They certainly don’t feel like shoddy $1 cabinets. I mean, just check out the interior fittings on them. Hellooooo slide-out shelves!

6Dollar Inside Drawers

If you didn’t already connect the dots, they’re meant for our built-in office workstation that we talked about in this post and we hope to set them up like this: two cabinets against the left wall, open space for a chair, two cabinets in the middle, open space for a chair, two cabinets against the right wall to create built-ins that we discussed right here in this floor planning post…

OfficeGrid Sixth Position

With that arrangement we’ll have exactly 30″ for each of our chair openings, which is perfect since our chairs are 24″ wide (and six inches of wiggle room is a lot more than we have in our current small-homemade-desk-made-from-a-door situation). Of course our new cabinet friends do need a bit of work before they’re ready to move in permanently. For starters, they need a coat of primer and some glossy white paint (they appear to be 100% solid wood, so they should be great when it comes to adhesion and durability like traditional painted cabinets). Oh but we’re not going to paint the inside of them (lots of white built-ins actually have wood interiors – which hide marks and smudges a little more, too). All of the new white KraftMaid drawers from our first kitchen were wood on the inside, and we really loved it. But don’t worry, we’ll share all the painting details as we go.

We also need to do something about their height, because they’re only about 26″ tall and our chairs are 27″ (so the arms wouldn’t even slide under them if we added a countertop at this point).

6Dollar Next To Chair

Ideally we’d like our desk to be about 30″ tall, so I’m thinking I’ll build just a simple box on top of each cabinet pairing that I can paint along with the cabinets so they look seamless. Haven’t decided if it’s worth building it as a little open shelf up there or just fronting it with a solid piece of wood (kinda like those dummy drawers in front of kitchen sinks). Or we could build them up from the bottom. Not sure yet, but we’ll definitely keep you posted.

It was not only amazing to find $1 cabinets, but to realize that they weren’t too tall like 99.9% of the base cabinets out there (which are 35″ and hard to cut down since they’re one solid piece that includes the kickstep) was such a relief. Plus they were still deep enough for a desk (upper cabinets were the right height but only 12″ deep, which would make for a very very skinny desk or all need to be built out from the back with a lot more lumber than building these up a few inches). So yeah, we’re psyched. After some pretty thorough searching, the cabinet gods were good to us. Which was especially nice after the file cabinet gods weren’t as sweet (we searched for eight months for secondhand file cabinets for the office and ended up giving up and spending $150 on this system from Ikea). You win some, you lose some I guess.

Anyway, since not everyone can stumble upon the cabinet equivalent of The Dollar Store, we thought you might appreciate hearing the other places that we looked and the other solutions that we considered (of which there were maaaany). So we’ll be back to fill you in on all of that research / legwork / consideration in a few hours. Hopefully sharing a few other options that we considered may help someone else who can’t find secondhand cabinets that work for their project. In the meantime, what’s the best under-ten-dollar purchase that you’ve made? Was it clothing? House related? Did you buy a movie ticket and meet the man of your dreams there? Someone out there has to have one of those should-be-made-into-a-movie stories.

Comments

  1. Anna Barlowe says

    Wow, awesome find! We had that bedbug problem ourselves at our old place, thanks to a less-than-hygienic roommate. It really was horrifying, although thankfully we caught it early so it wasn’t too hard to get rid of. Your post on the subject is very useful – I hope everybody reads it. You just can’t be too careful these days.

    Reply

  2. Radhika Paruchuri says

    I like to see some nice legs on them to lift them up rather than adding a box on the top. Given you luck, I am sure you can find some cool looking legs for all 6 cabinets for less than $2 :). Then you can reach the power outlets, or anything that gets dropped behind without any problem and keep the floors clean.

    Reply

  3. Emily F. says

    Wow! That’s an amazing deal!

    I would say our best deal would be our stove top. I checked Craigslist everyday, months before we were planning to do a mini remodel in the kitchen, and came across a brand new, never installed, flat-top stove top in exactly the right size and color (black) for $20!!! It’s over $500 new! The guy said he was doing a kitchen for someone and they changed their minds on the stovetop, he couldn’t return it because he didn’t have the box and just wanted to get rid of it. My husband was very skeptical that it would even work but it did! (After he had initially hooked up the wires wrong, ranted that OF COURSE it didn’t work for only $20, then realized his wiring error…lol)

    Reply

  4. Alexandra E says

    Best under-$10-purchase. I bought a leather jacket from goodwill for $7.50 and sold it for $750. no joke

    I’m a sucker for a good deal so when I found a fabulous vintage leather jacket, slightly too small for me, on sale for $7.50 I decided to take it home and either lose 15lbs or give to a dear friend. In awe of its beauty I happened to notice that it was rediculously well made and did a google search for the company that made it: East West Musical Instruments. Turns out it was a San Francisco failing music company who randomly got into the leather jacket making business in the 70s. The jackets were custom made for their owner, and although they stopped making jackets after a short 7 years, their jackets are still highly desirable — and so now my jacket has returned to Cali and is being worn by someone (slightly smaller than me) who loves the jacket as much as I did.

    Reply

  6. jenn says

    hey did you guys just get an earthquake? i felt a wee one here in toronto, turned on the news and it said it was in VA. crazy it traveled that far!

    Reply

  8. Leigh Anne says

    I just heard there was an earthquake in your area – we felt it here in Louisville, KY!! Hope you all are doing well and everyone is OK!

    Reply

  13. Victoria says

    I think it would be cool to somehow add a board or something on each side of the top of the cabinet then put the countertop on top. That way you could have a slide-out basket to keep small office utensils and treasures, like a drawer. Does that make any sense?

    Reply

  14. Marissa says

    we just got aftershocks here in north carolina from the earthquake that was in virginia. just wanted to make sure the petersiks are ok…

    Reply

  15. Wendy says

    You guys must be the luckiest two on the planet! That is so awesome! I’ve been hitting up our Habitat for months now, trying to find cabinets for my laundry room! You really hit the jackpot!

    Reply

  16. Valerie says

    I am sure one of your hundreds of comments already said this, but just in case, here is what I would do if it were me: I would take the $ saved on $1 cabinets & build drawers to go above the cabinet space. I would do one with 2 drawers of equal width. The second would have 1 drawer running the width of both cabinets, so there would be space to store BIG items. The third would have 4 small drawers of equal width to corral things like pens, staplers, paint sample cards, fabric scraps, etc etc etc. You could arrange these three layouts in the locations along the built in that best works for your needs. Thanks for letting me share my free unsolicited advice, lol.

    Reply

  17. Pamela says

    Amazing find at the ReStore! Niiiice. Absolutely ideal for what you’re envisioning for your room & perfect timing! I noticed when I was at the ReStore that they had shelves of brand new (unopened) boxes of pretty hardwood & laminate flooring left over from construction projects. Sweet.

    P.S. – Burger looks so aerodynamic in the photo with his ears back. I always love his facial expressions…so stinkin’ cute. He just has a presence about him, doesn’t he? :)

    Reply

  18. kathy says

    OK, I’m going to say this in my best Napoleon Dynamite voice: “Lucky.”
    ha! I cannot wait to see how you two magically transform your office!

    Reply

  20. Britt says

    I went to a garage sale and got 2 solid oak side tables, a leaf blower/vacuum/gutter cleaner, 2 outdoor light fixtures,

    Reply

  21. Britt says

    I went to a garage sale and got 2 solid oak side tables, a leaf blower/vacuum/gutter cleaner, 2 outdoor light fixtures,several rakes, and yard tools for $25

    Reply

  22. Holly says

    meant to be…you guys are definitely meant to have an amazing built in desk/office space! that is an awesome find. i just finished listening to the interview from john’s link…you are so inspirational! good luck with the office project, i’m super excited to see how it turns out! :)

    Reply

  23. Jamie says

    Love some ReStore action…so lucky that we have 2 here in Charlotte! Hey, I was wondering if you guys had heard (you probably have) of Google SketchUp? My husband loves to use it for sketching (duh!) up dreams for our house…add-on, porch remodling, kitchen, you name it…I know you guys like to sketch…just thought I would pass it along..I’m sure it isn’t news to you.

    Reply

  25. Angela says

    You had bed bugs???? Aaahh those things haunt my dreams! I work at an apartment complex (which will remain unnamed) and we are CRAWLING with them. Ok… maybe 6 active apartments out of 300 doesn’t qualify as enough to panic about, but it’s enough to make me itch constantly. I know all the mess that goes along with treating them, so you have my deepest sympathy!!

    Reply

  26. Connie says

    Before you decide whether to add a spacer to top and bottom, shouldn’t you sit in your chair and practice reaching whatever might get stored on the bottom shelf? Is it easy to reach when it’s almost at floor level or would raising it a few inches be easier?

    My choice (but I’m older than you) would be to raise the cabinets a few inches with a solid base. Open legs will create a spot to collect dust and lose things.

    Reply

  27. Amy says

    So that’s why you took a picture of the red bowl!!! I remember you all and you’re cute families. Hope you’re enjoying your “C”. Will see if I can dig up a “B” for you. Or perhaps a lowercase “d” which backwards looks just like a lowercase “b”.

    Thanks for the Red Barn love. It’s much appreciated!

    I’m sure I can’t beat $6 for 6 cabinets – amazing! – but I did get each of my children’s vintage iron beds at auction for $10 each and my mom got my son’s cowboy dresser at a store in Ellicott City for free if we would occasionally call it “Bob”. So, we occasionally call it – or him – “Bob.”

    Next time you’re in town please introduce yourself. I believe we have a friend in common. In fact, if you’re looking for a place to do your book signing, we would LOVE to host!

    Thanks and take care!

    Reply

  29. matti says

    How bout topping and or bottom-ing them with crown molding for that extra lift? But you prolly already thought of that!

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      That would be really pretty! Just have to figure out a way to make them sturdy under that so they can hold the weight of the counter and our computer and stuff!

      xo,
      s

  30. Jen says

    I AM SO JEALOUS!!!! lol. And random question (I, shamefully, have not been following your blog for too long) – how did Burger get his name? It’s super cute.

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      When we got him he was 2 lbs and curled up and looked just like a hamburger bun (all sandy and tan)- he also had a bare spotted belly like a cow- and so the name was born!

      xo,
      s

  33. Sharon says

    Why not build a base of 2x4s to raise it to the proper height and then trim out with baseboard. It would be way easier than doing the box/shelf on top. … then just a sheet of MDF for a continuous top.

    Reply

  35. Kate says

    great score on the cabinet front. I just read your other bed bug post. Argh! So sorry you had to live with them. We acquired about five on a visit to Australia. Unluckily it was as we’d just packed up for a flight from Cairns to Sydney so I couldn’t unpack the case to check if any had got in. We weren’t bitten but found a few on the bed, despite looking on the curtains and in the seams when we got there, I figure they were babies looking at the size of them. Anyway, I itched and itched and itched the entire 3 hour flight to Sydney and my husband was less than impressed when I insisted on unpacking both cases (with 4 weeks worth of clothes/misc. items) over the bath in the new hotel so I could shake our stuff out and check for the bugs. Good job I did as 10 had come along for the ride in the suitcase. We were lucky that they hadn’t laid eggs in the suitcase and all seemed well after that. I’m completely paranoid about checking for them now!

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      Oh my, that’s awful – but glad you checked! Much better than bringing them home with you – or living with them for 4 weeks while you traveled!

      -John

  36. Anna, Sydney says

    Haven’t commented for aaages, but never stopped reading.

    An idea for your too low cabinets. I couldn’t find a picture of what I wanted to show you, but imagine something like the legs of this desk (http://seek.autodesk.com/product/latest/agg/artcobell9/ArtcoBell/00311Artco-BellSagus011409Ver1D500X), but ON TOP of the cabinets and resting the countertop on top of the “leggy thingies”. Does that make sense? Just a thought.

    Good work on the blog as always.

    Reply

  37. Ro says

    Love the cabinets and can not wait to see the finished product. Side note I am a Social Service Coordinator and with this position we had to receive training on bed bugs. Bed bugs hate direct light on them. Take a flashlight with you and shine in those cracks and cervices. Bed bugs do not get their color until they have had their first blood meal. But if there are any present that are babies no coloring)they will move and try to get away from the light. Also use 91% alcohol and spray on them. It dries them up. If you purchase furniture from a garage sale spray down with alcohol and wrap in plastic for a couple of days.

    Reply

  39. Lisa Martin says

    Whoa, you hit the motherload of bargains with those awesome cabinets!

    Just my two cents on the height difference: why not build a base underneath to give them a boost up so you don’t have to strain to put ‘stuff’ in or get it out when you’re sitting in your chairs.

    Can’t wait to see the ‘after’ transformation!

    Reply

  40. Jill Campbell says

    HOLY CR*P!! I am soooo jealous! You know, if you don’t have a use for those pull-out drawers, I’d be happy to recycle them for you. ;)

    Still looking for a steal of a deal for outdoor cushions for my new (many years used by someone else) patio furniture. Need 2 cushions measuring 24″x18″x3″ and 1 cushion measuring 48″x18″x3″ (or they can be 4″ thick, not picky about that). However, I’m cheap and don’t want to spend more than $100, if possible. Let me know if you have any leads. $6 for them would be GREAT!

    Reply

  41. Susan Reeves says

    Okay you find 1 dollar each cabinets… I’m thinking they won’t be real wood and will be just one big box of space inside… Holy mama! Those pull out shelves are awesome! Real wood! Nice style! Nice hardware! Your blog has brought you good karma for thrift shopping.

    Reply

  42. Cynthia says

    You guys are constantly claiming that you “really are human” and that things don’t always go exactly as you planned. If it weren’t for the ceramic dog incident, I would be unconvinced.

    I’m sure that you guys are going to have an amazing office soon! Thanks for the link about the bed bugs. I work in Boston and they’re reputed to be here, too. Has made it so I pretty much refuse to buy upholstered things in the city. Which kinda stinks, because there’s GREAT craigslist stuff in Boston.

    Best recent buy: IKEA PS Cabinet that I’m converting into a water-resistant kitty-box house. Normally $99, craigslist–$20.

    Reply

  43. Alex - Old Town Home says

    I didn’t see this post yesterday with all of the madness surrounding the quake. Red Barn is right around the corner from our house and we love that store. We know the owner, Amy, she’s a very cool lady. She’s a reader of our blog too and has really helped us out a lot. She gave us the tip on the DIY network that ended up with them filming several segments for an upcoming show in our house.

    The funny thing is, we have some of those very same letters in our house too (but with our initials (-: ). Those letters were one of the very few “casualties” of the earthquake. They jumped from their location but were easily picked up and put back in place.

    Glad to see you were in Old Town doing a little shopping. We will return the favor in a few weeks and spend some of our cash in the Richmond area when we’re down there for a wedding. You know, because we totally wouldn’t have spent it if you hadn’t been up here in the OT.

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      It’s so funny that you know Amy the owner! What a small world. She stopped by here to comment yesterday and it was such a nice susprise. Next time we’re in the area we’re definitely going to stop in and say hi!

      xo,
      s

  44. Wendy says

    Hope you had a nice visit to Old Town! We live right around the corner from Red Barn, and I have several of their vintage letters as well. I can’t help picking them up for friends too. :-)

    Reply

  45. noelle says

    Your office inspiration pic is my inspiration pic too! I can’t believe you guys had the luck to find those cabinets for so cheap, and that they are close to the right size… I guess I’m going to have to build myself some. I also didn’t realize IKEA had such cheap countertops, http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70145556.

    I’m blogging about my office remodel here: http://prissthis.blogspot.com/2011/08/office-makeover-update-yellow-and-gray.html

    Thanks for the continued inspiration! You guys are awesome!

    Reply

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