Archive for September 14th, 2011
Not just a bookcase
Hello everyone. Well, I don’t know about you, but my crafty space is never 100% what I want it to be. I’m forever organizing and reorganizing. Lately, if necessary I build things in order to get what I want.
So, what do you do when you run out of things and places to put things? You go trolling around the house for things to repurpose! That part can get a bit tricky because if you find something really big, like say a bookcase, someone might notice that it’s suddenly missing!
This time I repurposed something from the garage. I was just bringing it back in the house where it belonged anyway. It used to up on the 2nd floor in my husbands home office but I was thinking it’s better to carry something DOWN the stairs then UP. YAY! I win! My room is DOWN!
So . . I have this bookcase downstairs, now what. I had thought it’d be perfect for storing my stamp CD cases. It turns out that the bookcase is nearly 2 feet deep! How deep is a CD case? Well, I didn’t measure it, but I’m know it’s not 2 feet! LOL
I wasn’t smart enough to take a picture of my bookcase before I did anything to it, so here is a picture of one similar that’s empty.
Now, the problem with this is that it looks pretty, but has severe limitations. My bookcase is about 7 feet tall, 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep. It has only 3 shelves. Three shelves for 7 feet?! Do you see where this is going? That’s a lot of wasted space right?
So, off to the power tool room I went and started thinking up ways to maximize this newfound storage unit. What I ended up with was a stepped approach. It isn’t pretty but I’ve effectively tripled the useable space in my bookcase. 
I now have 3 shelves in one. You can see where the “measure twice . . . cut once” rule might have been useful. But I was in a hurry! I wanted it done right how! lol
I used 1/8” chipboard that I got at the Home Depot and 2” x 4” pieces for supports in behind. Easy peasy!
Now all my stamps are on a single shelf! Prior to this they were in a few different places because no single place was big enough to accommodate them all. Not like I have a bazillion of them either. Now I have room for as many as I could ever possibly want or need!
See, they’re already starting to creep onto the next shelf and I have a whole bucket of stamps that have been waiting for indexing. I might have enough to fill up the bottom row here.
I find this is also a perfect place to store those bottley things and keep them visible at the same time.
Strangely enough, I have 2 empty shelves with nothing to put on them . . . . yet. In the fullness of time . . . .
So, although it’s not the prettiest, it does seem to be very functional and a great solution for getting the best use out of limited space.
I hope this has been helpful for some. Now, go dig out those power tools!
