She just wanted everything gone; I could keep anything worth keeping, and sell, donate or toss the rest. A lot had to be taken to the dump because age/weather/mice, but there was a few items I was able to salvage/clean up.
One of the things was an antique chiffarobe.*
Couple of years ago I posted about we'd remodeled the old upstairs kitchen into a bedroom. It didn't have a closet, and I didn't especially want to take space from the room to build one, so I had been on the lookout for a wardrobe of some sort.
The chiffarobe was a little rickety so we added some bracing inside, tightened some nails and added some screws.
The clothes hanging brackets ran from front to back, one on each side.
We removed those, and added closet pole hangers, and a dowel for a closet pole.
I painted the outside with white semi-gloss paint I already had.
It didn't originally have knobs, but it was difficult opening the doors with just the key in a key hole, so I decided to add handles or knobs.
Not long after, my brother-in-law moved houses, and threw out some old, cheap, broken down furniture (yes, I did bring home a few items anyway)....There was a dresser or night table, I can't remember which, that the drawer front had fallen off, so I grabbed it and took the set of knobs from it. Spray painted them gloss-black.
I painted the interior a blue/lavender'ish color that is not nearly as electric-neon color as it looks in the picture...I don't know the name of the color, it was a can of paint I acquired or was given, with a sample of the color dabbed on the outside of the can, but had no sticker with the color name or mix....and painted the pole black.
Wa-la! (Voila', I just get a kick out of ppl saying wa-la!)
A lovely closet (if I do say so myself) that only cost about $3 bucks, for the dowel.
* Technically it's a wardrobe, because it has no drawers, but we have just always called these types of pieces of furniture 'chiffarobe' (correct spelling is chifferobe), except for the cedar wardrobe Grannie had, we called the cedarobe, lol.
