Hasta La Ideas

With my small storage problem solved, now it was time to come up with a storage solution for medium-sized objects. The simplest thing would be for me to go to Ikea to buy a bunch of bins and boxes, and something to hold them all, but I decided to make something instead. Time is money, and right now I lack both of those currencies. I’d need to come up with something I could quicly whack together in an afternoon or two and without spending any bread.

For the design process, there’s two easy ways to start: Option #1 is to look at the objects you need to store, then design a storage system around them. Option #2 is to look at what materials you have on hand and figure out what’s possible to build with them. I took a cursory look through all the medium-sized crap I need to store: Computer cables, plumbing fixtures, electric motors, sewing machine belts, special light bulbs for the photography studio I run, blah blah blah, and quickly concluded it would be impossible or too time-consuming to design a system around this random pile of crap. So I’d go for Option #2 and build it out of garbage if I needed to.

I started poking around in the photography studio where I’d built the banquettes mentioned in an earlier post. I’ve been using the banquettes to store wood cut-offs, and had tons of those on hand in odd sizes. Typically too small to be useful and too big to throw away.

Another thing I had plenty of were these cardboard boxes that the seamless background paper comes in. Every few shoots I have to order more seamless, and breaking these boxes down for recycling is kind of a pain, so they really start to pile up.

The boxes are roughly four inches square in cross-section and an unwieldy nine feet long.

I grabbed one then pulled out some wood scraps and put them next to each other to see if anything jumped out at me.

One thing I noticed is all of the wood cut-offs were wider than the cardboard box.

Then the solution became obvious: I should make a matrix, replicating the simple design of the Stack-On storage drawers by cutting the cardboard boxes down to make drawers and using the cut-offs as the vertical supports. I had two sheets of 3/8″ plywood, roughly 48″ by 32″, left over from a shoot, that I figured I could use to make the horizontal pieces.

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