The argument about whether the hallway cabinet should have doors or open cubbies ran for about a year and a half, on and off, whenever someone stubbed a toe or lost a trainer in the depths of it. The open cubby side wanted to see everything at a glance, grab and go, no fiddling. The doors side wanted the mess hidden, because nobody needs to open the front door to a guest and have forty shoes staring back like a police lineup. Neither side won. What actually settled it was the dog eating a slipper directly off an open shelf in front of three witnesses, at which point the cubby argument quietly died and nobody ever brought it up again.
So it’s doors now, and it turns out doors are where you find out what a cabinet is really made of, so to speak. The hinges took the brunt of it.
Two kids who treat “closing” a door as a suggestion rather than an instruction will find the exact weak point in any hinge within about four months, and ours did, on the second cabinet from the left, which now closes with a soft clunk instead of a click and has done for two years without getting any worse, so we’ve made peace with it.
The drawer underneath is the real hero, if a shoe drawer can have a hero era.
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It holds the wellies and the football boots, the stuff nobody wants near the good shoes, and it has been kicked shut approximately never gently in its whole life. Still slides. We genuinely don’t know why. One of us thinks it’s the runners, another thinks it’s just luck and we shouldn’t jinx it by talking about it, which, fair.
What we didn’t expect was how much the top surface would end up mattering more than the storage part. It’s where keys land, where school bags get dumped for four seconds before someone remembers they exist, where the dog’s lead lives in a heap that looks accidental but is actually deeply intentional. A cabinet that’s brilliant inside but has a flimsy, scratchy top is a cabinet that looks tired within a year, no matter how well the doors are behaving.
The finish took a felt tip incident early on and mostly recovered, mostly. There’s a faint grey ghost of a stripe near the bottom that only the people who live here would ever notice, and honestly at this point it’s basically part of the furniture in the most literal sense.
Would we buy the same one again. Yes, though with the caveat that we’d tell past us to stop arguing about cubbies versus doors for eighteen months and just get a dog earlier, would have saved everyone a lot of time.
