Say someone you love gives you some closet doors.  And say they're painted with an adorable jungle scene you loved when you were three.  And, just for argument's sake, say you're in your 30s when you receive said doors, with a) absolutely no closets that fit them and b) no place to store them for the long haul. That would never happen, you say? Wrong.  It did.  The recipient was my husband. Way back when, his sister painted the adorable jungle scene on his bedroom closet doors. There's a monkey, a friendly-looking lion, a snake, a peacock, even a little boy who looks quite a bit like the toddler version of my husband. My sister-in-law was a pretty good artist at 17, and the doors really were lovely. So lovely, in fact, that her mom and dad couldn't bear to part with them when they moved house. The doors were taken down and packed, then moved through a succession of homes, only to end up in our basement with no hope of being put into service. (Or so I thought.) Now, I love a good makeover.  Whether it's Before & Afters on Design Sponge or an Ikea Hacker revamp, I'm up for it.  But I never thought my husband would go the upcycle route.  He loves to build things, but I never imagined he'd turn those old closet doors into an ingenious new piece of furniture.  But he did. Here's what he started with.  Cute, eh?

And here's what they became:

The old doors turned into a cabinet for my husband's audio gear (he's a sound editor). He cut the top off each door, then cut an angled slice off one side of each.  The scraps then turned into the front, top and back pieces (I love the bear with the bees' nest on the front).  He screwed the sides together with L brackets to make them strong.  Then he added rack rails, which support the gear pieces inside the cabinet – easy to find at a music store, but he bought them second-hand for a few bucks from another musician.  Voilà – the perfect cabinet for a musician with a taste for nostalgia.

Now all we need are few dozen more doors for some bookcases I have in mind....

Happy upcycling!