How to Make a Footstool From an Old Drawer!

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!

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


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.



Here is what the lid looks like from the bottom.


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.


I cut these down to use the cute turned portion.


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.


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


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.


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.


I predrilled the legs.


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


After sanding I gave it a coat of aqua paint.



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


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


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.


Tada!


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.


So I painted over them.


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


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





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!