Paper Castle

Posts Tagged ‘limited space’

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!