Card catalog

A basic IKEA Moppe storage chest gets an inexpensive makeover to resemble the look of a 4 drawer vintage card catalog. #IKEAhack #IKEAMoppe #Moppe #cardcatalog #Vintage #IKEA

A beautiful nine drawer vintage card catalog gets repaired, stained and painted for a fresh new look. #cardcatalog #vintagefurniture #furnituremakeover #paintedfurniture #librarycatalog

vintage library card catalogue used as escort card display. some drawers are filled with fresh herb plantings while others have dahlia arrangements in coral, peach and burgundy. (photo courtesy of Kathi Littwin Photography - www.kathilittwin.com)

After sitting in our garage for over a year, an old piece of a library becomes my repurposed card catalog - stop by and see how we did it!

I never would have guessed Joan Rivers and I would have anything in common. But there is something we have both loved doing for over thirty years.

Quarter-sawn solid oak card catalog with 35 storage drawers of uniform size. The catalog portion detaches from the wheeled base for ease of transportation. Each drawer includes the original tin nameplates and iron drawer pulls. Exhibits minor signs of wear and retains original varnish. 29.5" W x 23.5" D x 53.5" H Drawers (x35): 4.25" W x 20" D x 4" H

For those of you born after 1985: This is how you found books in the library before everything went online. This is a digital rendition of a 35mm transparency scanned with an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner. Some colour restoration has been applied.

One of a series of library education visuals designed by Peabody Visual Aids in the 1930s and 1940s, which I salvaged from a throw-away pile at my library school in 2003. These posters were created under the supervision of visionary librarian Ruby Ethel Cundiff. bit.ly/qWQ3YD. Many thanks to Gabriel Jaramillo at the Claremont Colleges Digital Library for the high-quality digitization.

I'm totally in love with card catalog home decor and it's my new mission in life to find one. I've seen some pretty killer DIY'd ones, but there's just something about an original and all the history it has. In the mean time, I'm just going to swoon over some of these beauts floating around

I have always wanted a piece of furniture with a bunch of tiny drawers. My mom had a spice cabinet on the wall of our kitchen growing that I would hide all sorts of treasures in. As I grew up I wanted my boys to have something similar. What I really wanted was a card catalog. I have actively searched for one for one for about three years. And the ones I found were either too big or too expensive. Every once in a while I would find a decently priced one on ebay but then I would notice the…