Sunday, April 05, 2009
Spring Storage-Racking
Since moving into our house in June 2008, we hadn't had much of an opportunity to organize anything in the garage. Sure, we had a few stacks of boxes, mostly baby clothes, but for the most part there was a lot of stuff strewn around the three sides that we don't drive through in order to enter the garage. Parking often involved attempting (usually successfully) to gauge the distance to the nearest object with no permanent place, such as the lawnmower or a stroller, so as to leave some walking room in between. There were a few miscellaneous boxes left from our move that just weren't convenient to access. Locating and fetching the stroller we needed for the particular task on which we were embarking (we have 5 strollers, all meant for different uses) was a dreaded chore.
All that began to change one fateful day (last weekend) at Costco, shortly after Becky had headed back to the car to feed fussy little Ethan, Eric and I took a detour through the non-food aisles on our way to check out. And what do you suppose I saw? Well, I'll tell you. (I was going to make you type and submit a guess, but I figured that might not work so well through RSS.) A storage rack!
There were two of them, actually. One could be used for industrial purposes and the other was shorter and not quite as sturdy, but looked like it would probably work for what we needed. They were both the same height, so I compared widths and prices and determined that if I were to buy two of the non-industrial-type units I would have more storage space than one industrial-type unit and still pay less. I also compared the weight it's supposed to be able to hold. Both held at least 1,000 pounds per shelf, which was plenty adequate. Not being an impulsive buyer and not having an empty trunk (or whatever you call the back of an SUV), I wrote the information down and we headed back home to think it over.
I bought one unit (just so I could put it to the test before buying any more). I put it together on Saturday afternoon this weekend, with Eric strapped into a high chair and watching from a slight distance. It was a pretty simple design; no fasteners were required. I got it assembled and then filled it up with some boxes. I even took advantage of the adjustable shelf height by clearing a large space for taller boxes on the bottom while leaving just enough room to fit the 2 leaves of the dining room table that we won't use unless and until we have a huge family gathering. I even tried putting the recycling bins on the middle shelf. They fit, but the storage rack was on the wrong side of the garage for that, seeing how we'd have to walk all the way around the car every time we had something to store for future recycling.
We decided that the product delivered the storage solution that we had expected, and that we would need a total of three of them to store all the stuff we had laying around. I slipped into Costco just before closing time on Saturday and returned with two more. Having gone through the assembly process already, constructing a couple more was easy. I did find one defect in one of the angle brackets in the second unit that would have prevented me from assembling the whole unit had the assembly been permanent, but since disasembly just required banging on the bottom of a few beams with a rubber mallet, I was able to render the defect in the bracket irrelevant by switching it out with another bracket that i had already installed. This placed the defective shelf hole in a place where it would be absurd to actually put a shelf.
After both other units were built, Becky and I loaded them with location-appropriate items, cleared out all the extra cardboard we didn't need that had been hiding within the ranks of the unstackable items, and stood back and took a look. I sure wish I had a "before" picture to show y'all (at the time--"before," that is--there had been no motivation to snap a picture, as it just wasn't picturesque). You'll have to settle for seeing the "after" shots.
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Labels: eric, pasco house, stuff
