Well we've been living in Maryland over five years now, which is kinda crazy in itself. This house has considerably less closet space than our previous house in MN, which resulted in most of the random stuff we kept in storage in our basement utility room. It's basically the only real storage place in the house, except the attic I guess. Even though I love to organize things, I don't always want to jump into projects because I get obsessive and want to do things my own way and at my own pace. So for five plus years, the utility room has had a bunch of boxes and totes piled up somewhat haphazardly.
Now this isn't a real problem per se. And for the most part it was out of sight out of mind. But after being in there recently, pulling out and then replacing the Christmas stuff, it was starting to bug me more. It definitely could be improved. Danielle then wanted to do something about it herself and started looking at shelves online.
I decided to take over, since it's an organization task I want to control, and I have the time. We did some measurements for size. Originally we thought it'd be a couple shelving units five feet wide. That's what fits the space. It was a very good idea to look at them at Home Depot before selecting anything. A five foot shelf is HUGE. And the one I originally picked online was outrageously overbuilt (and spensive). I ended up with one 4' W x 6.5' T x 2' D metal Husky brand unit. The two foot depth was the important length, and it couldn't be any less wide than 4 feet, so this was perfect and $70 cheaper than expected. It was still big and heavy, and hard to load into the car by myself but I made it happen. The single unit was to fit our Christmas stuff, specifically a taller artificial tree and a large tote, then I'd see what was still needed. After getting home I built it, making sure the large items fit as I spaced out the shelves, then fit the stuff already planned for it and a few other things. As part of this process, I pulled everything else out of room and set aside a fair amount to throw or donate.
Once I had the first unit up and loaded, I gathered everything else I could find in the house. Because I'm like that I opened and re-organized the remaining totes so they fit better and contained similar items, plus added all the other stuff I'd gathered. We did have to add a couple totes. Then to get a good idea of what shelving was needed I stacked them up and measured. It was obvious that another four foot wide unit would work. The second one needed to be 18 inches wide so we could still get around in there. It was surprisingly hard to find one that fit. Nothing was in stock at Home Depot (I didn't like the Lowe's options/prices) so I ordered to store online. This took a whole week, which seemed like forever since I was in the middle of a task and wanted wrap it up.
During this time I pulled out a bunch of boxes I've kept in case we ever move again. They're from large items and were previously just crammed and stacked in a corner. I got rid of a few of these and some other stuff I had forgotten were hidden in there, and was able to fit them all under the stairs in a way I'm really happy with. In a next level move, I even organized all the much smaller boxes we've saved from Amazon because, well, I'm nuts.
Anyway, the shelving unit finally arrived and that day I went to pick it up from Customer Service at HD. Since it was a big item it wasn't at the front, but I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly it was brought out. This one was even heavier than first one and harder to fit into the car even though it's still only 4' long. It's a Gladiator 4' W x 6' T x 18" D metal unit, but instead of metal grate bottoms (like the Husky) they are laminate. This is actually ideal since the plan was to just put totes on there, and it's easy to get them on/off. So I got home, put Jack down for a nap and put it together. Neither unit ended up being as easy to put together as it should have been. The Gladiator design was better for the connections, but the height I needed for some the totes resulted in a bit of difficulty all the same. For this one I did my best to secure it to the wall though the ends didn't line up with the studs. Jack was waking up as I threw the totes up on the new shelves but I had already done the organizing. Perfect timing.
Done!
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