The Complete Guide to Home Storage (Black & Decker Home Improvement Library)

At any given moment, your home probably contains thousands of moveable items, some large but most small: dishes and drain cleaners, blankets and baby books, socks and sleeping bags, hammers and hotdog buns, candles and can-openers and cribbage boards. In a perfect world, most of these items have homes–places where they’re stored outside daily view but where you can find them at a moments notice.   In our imperfect world, though, there are probably hundreds of items that are nomads, transients. They have temporary, exposed residences in jumbled drawers, on top of cabinets, across desktops, on window ledges. How often have you looked long and hard for an item in every logical storage place, only to find that it’s been hiding in plain view, in the last place you’d expect?   The goal of this book is to help you bring order to this jumble, to tame and civilize the hoards of small and large household items begging for permanent, logical storage. To do this, we’ll give you dozens of easy-to-build storage projects. Each is designed for adaptability and versatility, so you can use it for a variety of different purposes in various rooms. Some projects may require small alterations, but others can be built exactly as directed.   Before getting to the projects, we give you a section on planning and assessing, and a section on general building techniques that will be useful in many different projects.   After that, it’s off to the storage races, with more than 50 projects, ranging from basic wall cabinets to innovative racks for storing CDs and home electronics. While many projects use standard lumber and other building pipe and electrical conduit.   Have fun with these projects. Take the time to plan them out, and take pride in them when you’re finished. Remember: When you increase the efficiency of your storage space, you create a more comfortable living environment for yourself and your family.