Shelf Madness!

Recently, a good friend of mine has become consumed with a most wonderful obsession: shelf madness!

It all started when he realized that he was running out of room in the storage areas of his house. Although he’s an extremely organized person, he was still finding himself wanting more room to store things and work on projects in his garage and basement. Even though he already had some traditional shelves up in these areas of the house, he realized that if he had more shelves he would have even more room. Over the past two weeks he has put up at least six new shelves, without spending hardly any money and gaining the satisfaction of reusing materials that were already languishing on other areas of his property. He just can’t stop!

Now, at first, adding shelves of any sort to garages, basements and other storage areas of the house may seem like it will make the space smaller. After all, most people conceptualize the size of a room by the space in between the walls, and no matter what, shelves are going to make those dimensions appear to shrink. However, most storage areas completely under-utilize the space from about six feet off the floor up, and these areas are the perfect places to create new shelving to most efficiently use the space.

Most garages, for example, have high ceilings and therefore offer plenty of room to add new shelves. Most importantly, these new shelves will in no way decrease the overall usable space of the room. In fact, the results (as my friend will be glad to tell you…) are quite the opposite! Although this seems somewhat obvious, you would be surprised by how many areas in your storage spaces are just sitting there, waiting to become more usable space: the areas above doors, in crawl spaces, above rafters, etc.

The other amazing thing about shelving is that you can make it out of almost anything! Most of the shelf can be created out of any flat piece of wood that you may have already laying around and taking up space. My shelf-obsessed friend (no pun intended) recently created two shelves using an old fence that had blown down outside his house years ago. Outside of the main shelf component, you will probably want to buy some brackets at the hardware store, which usually don’t cost much. Additionally, if you’re handy with a saw, those brackets could also be made out of any piece of wood cut into a triangle shape.

Of course, if you are inexperienced with building these sorts of things, you should check the many resources online that show you how its done safely and correctly. But, once you have the shelf-awareness (pun unfortunately intended that time) you can catch shelf madness too and start getting things more organized and out of the way! Don’t also forget to use mostly (or even exclusively) reused materials, thus saving the environment and saving space to boot!