Making do with what we have
Posted by: TammyWe are blessed with a home.
That said, we never intended this home to be our final home. It was meant to be a starter home. We had always realized some limitations to this home as far as available room to grow BUT with the birth of our third son (our surprise) we began to realize that this might be the forever home.
The biggest issue to this home has been the fact that it’s a raised ranch (split-level to some of you) and the basement is half garage and half finished family room. We are extremely limited in storage space. On one hand, it forces you to buy wisely and avoid clutter. On the other hand, we’ve had to get creative with our storage needs.
Quite a few years ago, we had a new deck put on. The builder understood our storage needs and recommended going into the attic. He put in a pull down built in stair unit. We were able to lay down pressboard and then have access to storage room up in the attic. We store bins with off-season clothing up there, Christmas decorations and bins of clothing for future use (hand-me-downs and thrift store finds).
Another big thing I desperately needed was pantry space. Years and years ago (we’ve been here 16 years now), my husband put in shelves into the furnace room. It serves as my pantry. As our needs have grown, I added some small shelves to the space, too. The shelves were NOT the best use of that space, though. I’ve been pressuring my husband to add onto the shelves and help me maximize this space. Oh, in the cheapest way possible, too!
So this past weekend, he finally took on this project. He already had two pieces of pressboard leftover from the attic project. All he had to buy were the shelf angles to add two full length, deep shelves to the pantry for me! The bottom two shelves filled with my home-canned goodies are the newest shelves. They’re four canning jars deep (big quart jars) whereas the old shelving unit was barely 2 jars deep. All for the same space!
We were also careful not to put the lowest shelf too low so I could still slide my bulk storage buckets under the bottom shelf.
THEN came a stroke of sheer genius on my husband’s part. 
Here is a picture of the space between the studs in the furnace/pantry room:
(ignore the ski boots collecting dust from their 12 years of non-use…)
Well, my husband took scraps of two by fours we had from other projects and cut them to fit in between the studs and made shelves to hold my supply of nearly -free -after- sale -and -coupon shampoos, deodorants, hair conditioners, liquid dishwashing stuff and whatever else fit there. He made similar shelves in the space on the other side of the door and they hold herb and spices now!
The total cost for making do with what we have was about $16! It took my husband about 3 hours total. I love my pantry even more now! We’re making do with the space we do have and liking what we have a lot more!
- Tags: creating storage space
April 2nd, 2010 at 11:33 am
I am loving those shelves Tammy!
Laura
aka LWMSAVON