As the cold weather looms and access to my workshop becomes more limited, there were a few more projects I needed to finish. My wife and I had been working on organizing and cleaning out basement. Since we moved into our home four years ago, various amounts of junk and empty cardboard boxes had begun to accumulate in the forgotten corners of our basement. We went in and cleaned everything out and wanted to make a more intuitive storage space. Part of that solution included some simple storage racks, a pantry, and shelf.
Storage Racks
A built a new storage rack to hold plastic totes. The joinery provides strong support. The wood was mostly old 2×4 construction lumber and various other extra pieces I had lying around, like cedar planks from my fence, long strips of OSB, and long pine boards.
If you compare the construction of the new storage rack to the one I built in Nov 2018, it’s quite different.
While the old rack still holds things, its a bit wobbly and doesn’t handle shearing forces well. It was one of the first things I built before I started my woodworking journey. It was after that project I knew there was a lot more I needed to learn about woodworking, and over that winter I started watching lots of videos and reading lots of articles about woodworking, so that by Spring 2019, I was ready to start my journey.
It’s amazing to see how far I have come.
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Electronic Racks
I made two small holding caddies for our home router and fiber-optics routing box. It’s nice to have these up and out of the way, and all their cable neatly together.
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Pantry and Shelf
On the other side of our basement, in our “laundry” room / pantry. We had a large wire rack for storing our pantry overflow items. It was a poor solution, as small glass bottles had trouble staying on the rack and it was an ugly sight seeing all the items haphazardly on the shelves. To solve this, I built a large pantry with doors to hide the food items and shelves below for larger items.
Additionally, I added a mini-shelf to make cans and smaller items easier to see.
The final piece was a large basic shelf-cabinet for storing sodas, beers, and other treats.
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Lightning
I also updated the lightning in the storage room with the same LED lights I put in my workshop. Now I have a bright workspace if I ever want to take a project inside. Perfect for the winter!
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