I like to keep a lot of stuff around, from electric motors to fabric, wheels and push-buttons. The fact that if I need something I can just go grab it helps me tinker and test things. This helps a lot when designing and building my projects. But, having a lot of components and parts is only useful if you know what you have and can find what you need. And exactly that last point was starting to become a problem.
When building my workshop two years ago I made a system using Ikea Samla boxes, similar to what Laura Kampf made in her shop. The transparency of the boxes makes it super easy to see what’s inside and to find things and by making drawers out of them it makes for a very versatile storage solution which is perfect for storing all the parts I have upstairs.
The challenge here was that, because I want my 3D printer on it, my cabinet needed to be a lot deeper than the size of the boxes. And I hate wasting space. I had to come up with something to make smart use of the space behind.
After brainstorming a lot of ideas like; making a Ferris wheel construction or having some sort of drawer that goes back and up behind the front boxes. I figured that I just wanted to boxes behind each other, but in a way that it’s easy to see the whole row at a time.
By making a front section that also acts as a door to the section behind it you have full access to the boxes in front and when you open it you have a full view of the boxes behind it. Adding drawer slides to the design completed the whole concept.
The cabinet now has a large base box and in there, there are four smaller boxes, two in the back and two in the front. The cabinet in the back is for the large Samla boxes with heavy things, this one is mounted on drawer slides. Then the front cabinet holds 10 smaller Samla boxes with lighter things and is mounted with hinges on the back cabinet.
This allows to pull out the whole section and then hinge the front box out of the way to reach the back compartment.
A small tip from my side: if you design things that need to go upstairs or through a door, it can be helpful to check if the build fits through everything. In this case, I was very lucky, I had to remove the rails in the staircase and then I was just able to push it through. If I had made it 1 cm wider I would have had a problem..
