Chinese Cabinet: Before and After

(before)

(after)

(left drawer after)

(right drawer after)

When I first saw this cabinet, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Sitting at the head of the dining table, I thought it would be great as a serving station or bar. Since they also have two dressers in the dining area, we decided to put the serving pieces in the drawers and have this cabinet as the bar (the husband is a professor and gets a lot of nice bottles of wine and alcohol as gifts).

We cleared everything out, edited and sorted what was left, and redistributed to other areas of the apartment. A stemware rack makes the most use of the top shelf. The middle shelf in the after pic was actually a cover to the bottom 'pit'. This is supposed to be for hidden or long term storage below. I thought it would be better used as a floating shelf below the drawers. My installer used small metal braces to connect the shelf to the cabinet since it's about 2" short of sitting in the existing sides which you can see in the first pic; there's a small green box sitting on the left side brace under the drawers.

The bottom 'pit' holds excess wine bottles and alcohol. Middle shelf is for wine and has placers to keep the bottles from moving. The client is very happy not only with how it looks but how we organized it by reusing so many of her beautiful little dishes and bowls that she thought she had too many of without any real use for.

Note: I know these pics aren't great. I'm getting a new camera and when we're done with the apt, will take pics of the whole place as an apt tour to show you everything we did here. It's a great space, can't wait to show you!