Home Decor and DIY: Kitchen Reveal

Kitchen Reveal – TV Cabinet Upcycle

The last few weeks I’ve been sharing the different features of our new white kitchen, and today we’re talking about our TV cabinet upcycle. The definition for the word upcycle is “reuse (discarded objects or material) in such a way as to create a product of a higher quality or value than the original”. Today I’m going to share how we upcycled our old TV cabinet into our new microwave/storage cabinet for the kitchen.

TV Cabinet Upcycle

This post contains some affiliate links for your convenience. Which means if you make a purchase after clicking a link, I will earn a small commission. The great thing is, it won’t cost you a penny more! Click here to read my full disclosure policy.

This TV cabinet held our big/deep old TV, and it had to go when we bought our flat-screen TV.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take good “before” pictures of the TV cabinet. Here’s a side view of it in our living room.

I thought about trying to sell the cabinet on Craig’s list, but then decided to hold onto it in case I could find another use for it. It had a lot of good storage space, but I wasn’t sure how to re-use it.

Here it is in one of our bedrooms, which is where it sat for a year or so. This picture shows it with the doors closed.

When we were planning our renovation project, it hit me one day that we could turn the cabinet into a microwave/storage cabinet for our kitchen. We have a wall that is the perfect size for it.

The cabinet would have to be painted. (I’m not a fan of the orange oak color anymore!) Also, we would need to add shelves, and of course, do something about the big hole in the back wall.

First, I took off the doors, and had them spray painted with the rest of the kitchen cabinet doors.

The hinges were very unusual, and I couldn’t find any to replace them. Fortunately, they were very easy to spray paint the finish that I needed.

I planned out where I wanted the new shelves for the inside of the cabinet. The carpenter who built the new soffit in the kitchen made the new shelves for us. He re-enforced the large opening in the back with strips of wood first.

Then he added the V-board to the back wall and the shelves. The V-board was left over from our kitchen peninsula project, and the shelves were made out of MDF we had left-over from making shelves for a couple of new closets in our basement.

Here’s the cabinet with the shelves all done and ready to be painted. The top and bottom pieces of wood were real oak, but the rest of the cabinet was laminate. I’ll be sharing how I painted the laminate soon.

The cabinet is finally in the kitchen – all painted and waiting for the doors to be put back on. You’ll notice that there’s a hold cut in the back wall for the microwave cord.

All finished!

I absolutely love all the extra storage that we have now. I added baskets for the shelves, and made liners for them. Which I’ll be sharing a tutorial for soon.

The baskets are storing craft supplies for the grandkids, paper towels and plates for when we’re using the microwave and chargers for our electronic gadgets.