Well, I finally got around to making another set of shelves for the garage. We had an awkward area between the fridge and the door to the house that had become sort of a dumping ground. It housed some cheap plastic stacking shelves where I mostly kept all the paints and stains. In front of that became the permanent home of a kid's wagon and other outdoor toys.
So, instead of tripping over all that stuff for the rest of eternity, I put together another super simple set of shelves!
While there's nothing particularly special about this unit, what really makes it really nice for us is that it's 100% custom built to fit the space perfectly.
In this post, I really want to call out how much I appreciate the free online version of Sketchup. Almost anything that I build of my own design, I first model in the app. I'm a visual person, and creating something in Sketchup gives me the confidence that if I can model it, I can build it.
My wife, who is the organization specialist in the family, came up with some specifications for these shelves. I went to work on the computer, and after a couple of iterations came up with a design for what we wanted to build.
At that point, it was as simple as just putting things together. I first built the 3 shelf frames, and then attached the 4 legs. Once I was satisfied with the frame, I cut some 1/2" OSB down to make the shelf tops. I was able to do the whole unit out of 2 sheets of OSB. The bottom two shelves are one solid surface, and the top shelf is 2 parts cut from the excess.
And here's the shelf all loaded up:
Actually since I started writing this post last year, we've already made some modifications. We got a free ride-on car off Facebook Marketplace, so I took down the whole rack and adjusted the height of both shelves to better fit everything we needed to jam in there.