I recently changed my apartment, to something bigger and nicer. But combining two households basically doubles the things you have to stow away.
The household room is perfect for such a matter. It allows you to put everything out of sight. To maximize its usable space, a well outplanned storage solution is crucial. With the dimensions of the room we got to work with, and the fact that this small space also needs to contain the washing machine, there was no easy and off the shelf solution available to efficiently use up all the space.
But since I call myself a maker, and my new address is conveniantly directly accross a hardware store, I knew how to deal with this kind of problem: building a custom solution. For the layout of the appartment I had already a Fusion 360 document with the blueprint and I started to design different shelf layouts.
The criteria were the following:
- Must use up the available space as efficiently as possible
- Should use mostly off the shelf components from the hardware store
- Cannot block access to the main water valve, or the electrical cabinet
- Contains the washing machine without touching her to avoid vibration
- No holes in the wall
So after playing around with different options, I came up with the following design. It is easy to build and uses the same standard board 6 times, two of the boards cut in half in the hardware store. Everything is on stilts such that the washing machine fits perfectly underneath.
I then went to the hardware store and got all the materials I planned to use
And when I came home, I started assembling the shelves
Overall, I really like how everything turned out. Even though it has little to do with my usual projects, it still shows how you can use your 3D skills (In this case the use of a CAD software) to archive different things in life. And it is so much more rewarding to claim that you designed and built your shelf from scratch than screwing something together that lots of people own as well.
If you want to plan a custom shelf or a piece of furniture, feel free to reach out to me via email using this link.
