We love nearly everything about our little ranch house — in fact, it’s the only home we have owned. That said, when we settled on this house, the one concession was settling for a single car garage. In order to win back some storage space, (who actually parks their car in the garage?!) I repurposed the awkwardly placed closet directly above the basement stairwell.
I designed the entire unit myself, starting with a bit of online inspiration, sketching out ideas and graduating to precise plans in Adobe Illustrator. I worked around the stud framework from the existing wall, due to the weight to be supported. We used heavy-duty, 36-inch full-extension drawer slides and built multi-level drawers from 1/2-inch Baltic birch plywood. The finished product is fantastic — transforming a space that had been unusable to become both functional and accessible.
The finished unit is truly a thing of beauty — functionally and aesthetically. The only thing I would change is the grade of plywood that I used on the faces of the shelves. I learned a hard lesson about plywood grades. I had mistakenly assumed that Baltic birch plywood is by definition, furniture grade. What I learned is that even Baltic birch comes in various grades — some of which contain the “football” fillers where there had been surface defects. (Of course, I realized this after buying the sheets and cutting them down to fit in a smaller vehicle.) Nonetheless, it’s still a project that I enjoyed doing immensely and that I’m proud to have designed and built.
