How to Make a Footstool From an Old Drawer!

01 May
I am on a mission... to clean out my garage.

My mom and I will be having a yard sale in a month or so and that will take care of a lot of the stuff that's sitting out there but there will still be a lot of little things, things I can't bear to part with for some unknown reason. I guess I can see the vision of what these things could be with a little elbow grease and ingenuity!

So I've decided to commence... OPERATION GARAGE CLEANUP!! I am going to transform those treasures once and for all!

My first victim is an old drawer that's been sitting out there for probably a year or more.

I decided to create a cute little footstool from it!

Upcycled drawer footstool
Here is the drawer before. 

Drawer footstool before

It came from an old nightstand that I transformed into part of an adorable children's play kitchen! I sold it when I had my space at the antique mall.

You can see that post here: Upcycled Children's Play Kitchen.

I removed the handles and then started figuring out how to make it into a footstool.

remove the drawer handles

I knew I wanted my footstool to be a useful storage piece as well so I had to figure out a lid for the drawer space.

My goal with this project was not to spend any money and only use things I had on hand so I used two boards to form the proper depth for the lid and cut them to length.

make a lid for the footstool

Then I cut some strips of wood that would be attached to the bottom of the lid, they will sit down in the drawer to keep the lid from sliding around.

making a lid

footstool lid

Here is what the lid looks like from the bottom.

lid for a drawer footstool

Now, I wanted my footstool to have legs. Remember I'm not spending any money on this project so I dug around in my wood pile in the garage and came up with two table legs.

table legs to use for feet

I cut these down to use the cute turned portion.

footstool feet

So, of course, two legs isn't enough so I had to find something else, I thought it would be cute to have mismatched legs.

turned wood pieces

So a little chop-chop with my trusty chop saw and I have four adorable little footstool legs!

legs for a footstool

This drawer itself was pretty sturdy but the bottom was a little too thin to attach legs to so I cut a couple more pieces of wood and attached them with wood glue to the bottom of the drawer.

stabilizing the bottom

I was going to remove the metal drawer glide but it has screws that require a star bit and I don't have one that is the right size. Since it's on the bottom and not visible most of the time I just left it.

stabilizing the bottom of the footstool to add legs

I predrilled the legs.

predrilling

And then attached them by screwing from the inside of the drawer.

drawer from a footstool

After sanding I gave it a coat of aqua paint.

aqua paint

paint the drawer

Once that had dried I painted the whole thing with white called Arctic Cotton.

paint the drawer with a second coat of paint

For the top, I used an old pillow for padding and some plain white muslin to cover it.

pillow for padding

The white fabric will also help with disguising the pillow since I decided to use this cute little rag rug I had. I knew with the way rag rugs are made that once it was pulled tight over the pillow it would show the fabric underneath a little bit.

rag rug

Tada!

footstool cover

The last thing I had to do was paint and reattach the handles.

I thought it would be cute to paint them each a different color from the rag rug.

But in the end, it just wasn't working for me.

footstool

So I painted over them.

footstool made from an old drawer

I just couldn't bear to repaint the one leg, I think it's sweet and adds character 😊

chippy stool leg

I did a little sanding on the drawer, legs, and handles to reveal a little bit of the colors.

close up of hardware

upcycled drawer footstool

upcycled drawer footstool

using the footstool

Ahhh, that's one less thing cluttering up the garage and I'm really pleased that I was able to do it with no money spent (well... there was money spent but it was over the years... a couple of table legs here, a rag rug there, scraps of wood left over from other projects, etc.)

I have another drawer the same style as this one so there'll be another project coming soon!

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Make an adorable little footstool from an old drawer!


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