BESTA Stash Storage Upgrade

I really should just name this post Hell On Earth instead. This was so hard to get through. I took a week vacation off work and this was my project: replace the tired old cabinets that my stash was currently in and replace them with lovely new BESTA cabinets from IKEA.

A Bit About The Old Stash

This is what I started with. One brown cabinet and three white ones. There’s actually five of these cabinets – there’s another brown one. When I moved into this house I found out that despite calculations that the fifth cabinet would theoretically fit, it didn’t actually fit in the space because the floor molding made it just not have enough room. Which was such a disappointment that I didn’t have a perfect wall of cabinets for the stash. The extra cabinet was put next to my desk to provide office supply storage, and as you can see I put a load of crap in the empty corner.

I forgot to take a picture of the stash open before I took everything out of it, but I did managed to dig up this old picture of it on Instagram. The three white cabinets held all the fabric, while the brown cabinet (not pictures) held all my books, patterns, and unfinished projects.

I “inherited” most of this stash from my mother. My mother is still alive, she just doesn’t quilt anymore, but she had built herself a very comprehensive stash when she was still quilting. And I mean that literally – she deliberately bought things she lacked in order to round out the stash. Anyway, when I was moving into this house we sorted this stash about three times in quick succession. I picked out all the things I wanted to keep from her stash, she picked the few things she wanted, and then she donated the rest to the Salvation Army. We probably donated a good 50% of her original stash, and the number of boxes in my move doubled. It was 50% stash, 25% books, and 25% everything else in the entire house. The weirdest thing is that it never really looks like very much in pictures, but you feel how much it is when you have to go through it.

Anyway, I sorted the stash in a weird way initially. I thought maybe I would like to pick fabrics based on style. So I had them all sorted into things like florals, geometric, abstract, novelty, filigree, solids, etc. And then sorted within that by color. The problem is that I actually prefer picking things by color, and other than solids which I have never, ever used, I don’t tend to really pay attention to the pattern all that much. It also meant that things like novelty, which I generally avoid because I don’t particularly like fabrics with licensed characters or whatever on them, was getting overlooked, which was a shame because “novelty” also included animals and Christmas and various other things that I do actually want to use. So the whole thing needed to be resorted.

Living In Hell

Obviously the first order of business was to move everything to the other side of the room so we would have room to assemble the BESTA units. That’s them in the boxes underneath the tables. I didn’t realize the table had a bar that would impeded sliding them out. I did managed to leave myself a path to my bedroom, but I did have to sidle through it for 2 weeks. The dogs didn’t care because they’re short enough to go under the tables. Lucky.

So in the process of just prepping the area, I strained my left hand flipping one of the 8 foot long tables. I had thought to maybe fold the legs down to leave more room, but the legs were not interested in doing that. And in flipping one back onto it’s legs I hurt my hand. The next day I tried to persevere and I think I got about one frame together before I decided that I really needed to just rest my hand so I didn’t hurt it more. I also decided that I was definitely not going to be able to do this on my own and I was going to need help.

Luckily for me, I already had our handyman coming over to build a fence in my backyard that week. So I just added on to his tasks. I did continue to try to help when I could to help him along. I put on maybe a quarter of the doors myself, but I injured my right hand doing so. And around about Wednesday of that week I decided I simply could not deal with the stress and frustration of having my house upended and being completely unable to dig myself out this mess and decided I was just going to play video games instead. I put in a lot of hours on Kingdoms of Amalur. I finally got out of the forests of Dalentarth too.

Bolting the damn things to the wall was also a huge bitch. They don’t really come with instructions on how to do this, or any parts either. So we had to get drywall anchors, and then we had to get bigger drywall anchors. And the plastic bits on the back can’t take screws bigger than a 6, but they didn’t have 6’s that are 2″ long. And we couldn’t use wood screws because my studs are steel, so we had to go back and get steel screws. Even with help it was frustrating!

But finally, blessedly, on Friday we had all the frames bolted to the wall and all the doors put on. Oh did I mention how we bought all the high gloss white doors at the IKEA and were still 4 short? Yes. Mom was away all week, but when she got back from her trip on Friday she stopped by the IKEA and picked up the last 4 I needed. But she was busy scrapbooking that weekend so I had to wait another whole week, living in hell, before I could put the room back together. Because I needed her help to sort the stash and put everything back. I wasn’t about to injure myself again.

I used that week to put all the shelves in at my leisure and to peel all the film off the doors. I thought that part would be fun, but it was actually pretty difficult. It liked being on the doors. The next Saturday mom came over and we finished it up. This time we sorted the stash by color, and then we sorted each color into like fabrics. So you might have a light stack, a dark stack, and intense hue stack, or stacks that were a different shade. (Like the pinks have a coral stack.)

Behold The Glory Of The New Stash

I put the actual stash itself in the top two rows of doors so it would be at head height or so and you wouldn’t have to get on the floor to pull things from the stash. The bottom row of doors is for all that stuff that went in the brown cabinet. We also roughly followed that lighter fabrics would go on the top shelf of the door, and darker fabrics on the bottom shelf. The top row would be the primary rainbow, and the second row would be things not in the rainbow. And further related colors would go under their relation in the rainbow. So pinks are under reds, and browns are under oranges. I also split the teals and aquas out of the blues and greens because I find myself using them a lot and often they don’t really go with the others. We also kept patriotic fabrics separated out in case the quilt group wants to do a quilt of valor again (I am apparently the official keeper of the fabric for this). We sorted the novelty fabrics into the stash, though most of them probably ended up in multicolor. Solids were the only group that we didn’t sort and just stuck right in.

Top Row: reds, yellows & oranges, greens, teals & aquas, blues, purples

Middle Row: pinks, creams & browns, whites/blacks/greys, empty, multicolor, solids

Bottom Row: kits & patriotic, scraps, my unfinished projects 2, my unfinished projects 1, mom’s unfinished projects, books

Here it is in all its glory. The BESTA cabinets fit the space perfectly. So gained the 29″ of corner space and also a good foot all along the top because these are taller than I am. And we ended up with three whole empty shelves! And that means room to buy more stash!! I was also lucky enough that the late posted shuttle mission in Starfleet was all about spring cleaning and I was able to use this massive stash upgrade as a mission after all. Which is good because this really shut down my crafting for the whole two weeks. Probably going to be a good 6 months before I’m ready to do any more “DIY”. (Also the old cabinets went back to my mother, if anyone was wondering.)