5 Rooms in Need of Shelving

Are you constantly tripped over laundry detergent bottles on the floor of your laundry room? Have you lost your kitchen benchtop because you have so many pots, pans and small appliances taking up space and you have no where to put them? Can you barely fit your car into the garage?

If so, then the answer is simple: shelving. Here are five rooms in need of wardrobe shelving systems and how to make them seem bigger with shelving.

Kitchen

Perhaps the busiest room in your home, the kitchen sees a lot of action day in and day out. If it’s difficult for more than two people to be in the kitchen at the same time, then you need to maximise every bit of space you have. With shelving, this is possible as it takes the place of large, bulky China cabinets and keeps your home feeling open.

Your cabinets are probably split between holding food and cooking/serving utensils, and there probably isn’t room for much else. By installing shelves on an empty wall, you can display your finest dishes and make putting away clean dishes a snap. To store wine glasses, add slots to the bottom shelves so the bottoms of wine glasses can slide in and hang.

You can also display your finest and most festive dishes with stands. Prop up dishes on these stands to show off the details.

Additional shelving in the pantry can also utilise lost space. Add small, short shelves along a side wall and use them to store baking ingredients. To make it look a little more clean, pick up a few empty jars from a home goods store and empty your flours, sugars and other ingredients into their own individual jars. Once you label them, you’ll never have to go digging through your pantry to find ingredients.

Laundry Room

Laundry rooms are often small, cramped spaces with just enough room to do laundry and maybe fold a few clothes. To make the room more open, install shelves above the washer and dryer to put all of your laundry detergents and fabric softeners within reach and out of the way.

Shelving in the laundry room takes care of the clutter on the floor. Instead of tripping over the large bottles of detergent on the floor, you have an easy place to store all laundry chemicals. Now you will have more room for other items.

Shelving can also be a safety feature within your laundry room. Chemicals found in laundry detergents, packets, fabric softeners and cleaning products are poisonous, yet in their brightly-coloured bottles, they can easily attract the attention of children. Keep the detergent on a high shelf and far out of their reach so you never have to worry about your child ingesting something poisonous.

Home Office

If there’s one room that desperately needs to be clean and organised, it’s the home office. A cluttered office makes for a cluttered mind so use a shelving system to create a flow that will encourage you to always put things away.

In a corner of your office, preferably near your desk, install tiered shelves and go up as many shelves as you need. On each shelf, add a plastic or metal try and label them “In,” “Out,” “To do” and any other labels you might need. This is an easy way to keep track of documents that are coming in and out of your office, and it helps keep documents organised.

If your desk is feeling cluttered, install small shelves just behind of or in front of your desk and put your office supplies on it. Keep objects you don’t use every day (such as staplers, tape dispensers) out of the way so you can concentrate on the tasks at hand.

Have a lot of books and a small office? Rather than use large book shelves, install floating shelves above your desk to hold your collection. If you need one for reference, you only have to reach up and grab it.

Bedroom

Not all bedrooms have a lot of storage space, but with a wardrobe shelving system, your closet will feel twice as large. Whether you have a traditional flat closet or a walk-in closet, you’ll see how much space you have when you add shelves in the bedroom.

To liven up your traditional closet, take out the single bar stretching across it and install a shelf in the middle. Now attach four smaller clothing bars – two on top and two on the bottom – for your clothes. Group your clothes by item and divide them between the four bars. Place one bar higher to accommodate dresses and hang trousers and skirts on the bar below them. On the other two bars, hang blouses and other shirts according to sleeve length.

Now you have plenty of room for clothes and accessories. Store purses, clutches, scarves, jewellery and other accessories here to make it easier to grab them and go.

Install tiered shelves along the bottom to make shoe racks. For the pairs too nice to leave in the entryway or laundry room, these shelves will keep your nicer work shoes safe and stored away. When you need to leave the house quickly, simply grab a pair and go.

Garage

When you first moved into your house, you probably thought the garage was enormous, but after storing your cars, lawn mowers, tools and other items, your garage probably feels as if it has shrunken. Use shelves to open up your garage once more and make it easier to find your favourite tools.

Install sturdy steel shelves along the perimeter of your garage to hold storage bins and other large boxes. This is a great place to put holiday decorations that only come out once a year, and it gets boxes and bins off the garage floor so you have more room to move around. Beneath these shelves, you can also hang hooks to store racks, shovels, cords and even bikes.

When you don’t have room for a workbench or cabinets, a peg board can hold all your tools and other accessories that have nowhere to go. Use hooks to hang screwdrivers, wrenches and other tools and hang up vacuum attachments and weed wackers with larger hooks to get them out of the way.

Shelving can open up unlimited possibilities in any home. Whether you have a two-story home or a simple studio flat, you can make the most of the space you have and find new, creative ways to show off your style.