One of the things I really dislike about the e53 is the center console storage; it's practically useless. It's divvied up into two compartments, the upper one is supposedly for a cell phone

, and the lower one has a huge amount of space dedicated to CD holding trays. Seems like whenever we try to use the lower compartment for anything at all, it ends up bumping one of the CD tray release buttons, then when you close the lid things are all kinked up.
I'm kinda sick of it, so I'm thinking of tearing out some of the built-in stuff and just replacing it with open space for, you know, storage.
Useable storage. I'll probably take out the coin tray and CD storage, replacing it with a deeper well in its place. The rear-most part with the rubber bottom is just above where the rear cup-holder is stowed when not in use, so that will probably stay.
In the upper part, I think just removing the trays that were meant for the cell phone would make a huge difference; doing something to fill the odd voids that would be left at the edges would be necessary, just to keep small items from getting stuck.
I seriously doubt I'm blazing any new trails with a project like this; anybody done anything like this before and care to share what you've done? Any thoughts on my ideas would be welcome as well. I know it'll be a fair amount of work to keep it from looking like a hack job, and the return will be pretty minimal, but I'll be stuck inside & out of the sun for the weekend, so this ought to be a decent project for me.