The Critter - or my addiction to filing cabinets (Furniture For The Home in general)

Member Name: 2Quizzy

Product:	Furniture For The Home in general
Date:	01/03/04 (658 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: storage storage storage

Disadvantages: They're ugly

Feel free to skip the Critter's story to get to my discussion of filing cabinets in general.

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The Critter..

Fifteen years ago I went looking for spare parts for a tumble dryer. Eventually I found myself in a ramshackle repair shop on the edge of town. It was an old barn that had been converted into a shop of sorts and it was crammed full of broken electric appliances and greasy parts on rickety hand-made shelves. Whilst I waited to see if they had what I was looking for I noticed something odd huddled in a corner. A strange and very grubby piece of furniture? Or was it a wooden box? No, not a box as it had legs.. what on earth was it?

"You can have the filing cabinet for R20 (South African Rand equalling about one pound fifty) if you want it."

And that's how I ended up returning home with the critter.

The Critter was the ugliest piece of furniture I have ever seen as well as one of the most bizarre. Its whole charm was the combination. Basically it was made of up of three separate portions. The "body" was a large wooden drawer rather like a huge wooden shoe box in shape. It had one huge drawer with a little black handle in the centre that looked just like a bulbous nose. This box fitted onto a set of long wooden legs set onto a wooden frame and to top it all off it had a top "lid" like an extra shoe-box lid that fitted on top. Put together it stood about waist/hip high and looked just like some strange fantasy animal right out of Alice's looking glass.

Whilst cleaning it up my mom and I discovered a few fascinating facts. First of all it was made of solid oak and cleaned up to a very lovely mellow sheen and wedged at the back of the drawer we found five business cards. They were very aged, but the name and address was still legible. It was a Law firm in our hometown. My mom checked, but the firm no longer exi
sted. However she did find that the name of the solicitor on the card was still in the phone book so she gave him a call out of curiosity.

He was stunned. Even though he was now in his nineties and retired he remembered the Critter well. He'd been 18 when he joined the firm, had his first business cards printed and bought the Critter. The reason why it had a separate top and legs was that it was a radical new idea where you could buy extra modules and drawers to increase its size over time. As it turned out he never bought any more drawers for the Critter and when he next had his office renovated he had sold it and bought a nice new steel cabinet with four drawers. He asked us if we'd let him have the business cards, which we did.

Now that we knew the Critter's past it started to seem even more charming. For all its ugliness it was to be a very handy piece of furniture. Over the years I had it in my spare room/office it served numerous purposes. When I was at college it held all my papers and documents beautifully filed away in its innards. Later when I started sewing for myself it held every single pattern in two perfectly filed rows and my overlocker sewing machine fitted just perfectly on top. Later when I got my computer the top was where I had my first bulky dot matrix printer and later still it held my scanner and served as storage for all my computer related bits and bobs. That one huge drawer was always just the right size for whatever I wanted to store and the sturdy frame meant it could carry weights other lesser furniture couldn't cope with. Added to that the long tall legs meant that all sorts could be stored beneath it from boxes and books to waste paper bins and printer paper trays. For fifteen years it wedged itself neatly into any odd corner or empty spot and it was always useful.

So why the past tense? Sadly I had to let the critter go when I married and moved to the UK. The prices of sending my stuff ov
er by sea were too high to justify keeping the Critter and so I had to put it in the paper sales column. The first couple who came to view were very enthusiastic and so was I until they started to say how it was a bit bigger than what they needed, but once they'd cut the legs down and got rid of the false top it would be perfect. WHAT?? Hand the Critter over to butchers? NEVER!! I told them I was very sorry, but I couldn't sell it to them and they left looking very confused. The second person looked untrustworthy and admitted he was after "something for the stuff in the garage" so he left disappointed as well.

Finally I struck gold with the third man. A wispy birdlike man who ran a local antique store. He ran his hands over the Critter like a horse breeder admiring a thoroughbred and spoke in soft tones about "craftsmanship". He knew about the removable top with its little ball and groove clips and he even knew the name of the manufacturers. After a brief negotiation I waved goodbye to the Critter lovingly wrapped up in an old blanket on the back of his trailer. It was a sad moment, but we knew it had to be.

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Other Filing Cabinets I have known

Having found the Critter to be such a useful and versatile piece of furniture it didn't take me long to add more cabinets to my collection. A few years later I bought a plastic cabinet on wheels. This cheap cousin is a three drawer version that clips apart for easy packing. It came in a tasteful pale grey and proved so handy I bought a twin version a year later. They aren't as sturdy as the Critter and therefore you can't put heavy items on top of them, but their plastic drawers are easy to clean and that has been very useful. Back in South Africa I kept one in my bedroom for storing all my bulky items like jerseys and jumpers in and kept my portable CD player on top. The other one stood in the spare
room with all my arts and crafts supplies in it until my mom had to have surgery on her foot and wasn't able to get around easily for a few weeks. Then it became a very handy portable container. She put her knitting in the bottom drawer, make up and other personal goodies in the middle drawer and her books, magazines and pen and diary in the top drawer whilst her tea packet of sweets, the TV remote and newspaper fitted nicely on the top.

When I left SA they came apart and packed easily. They were the first things I took out of storage whilst we were stuck living in a two room flat for the first few months back in the UK. In the flat they were to be our main furniture. The one in the living room was our filing cabinet, coffee table, book case and held the computer scanner once we got it up and running again. The one in the bedroom was my bedside table, my dressing table and chest of drawers combined. A bit of a squeeze, but I managed. Now in our new home the upstairs one has it's three drawers divided into my husband's business filing, my jumpers and other personal papers. The downstairs one has my sewing stuff in the middle drawer with bills to be paid/recently paid in the top and my new arts and crafts bits in the bottom.

Added to that I have another smaller cabinet for fling papers in the lounge we're using as a coffee/side table. It's a four drawer one that's only a foot high and an A4 paper in width and depth. It was my dad's first and he used it to hold his teaspoon and coin collection until he decided to get rid of them all a few years back. Then I took it, recovered it's sad old cardboard body, and it used to stand in my bedroom cupboard with all my jewellery and make-up bits in it. Now in our lounge it holds the TV magazine, all the remotes, scrap paper and pens and I have two paperback books I'm reading in the bottom drawer.

I love my cabinets! :)

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Buying cabinets

Argos does a two drawer filing cabinet in pine or beech effect for 29.99. Their plastic drawer selection is huge and ranges from three to six drawer versions in clear or coloured plastic choices.

B and Q have a standard three drawer dark grey metal cabinet for 39.99, plastic three drawers on wheels for 24.98 and some really adorable pine boxes with lids for 9.98.

If you're looking for something "posh" try furniture123.co.uk who do a classier selection of office cabinets ranging from 70 pounds up in price.

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