Having recently shifted house, I have the opportunity to redesign and rebuild my living environment. Typically this would just involve choosing where to put my bed, and what corner I’ll put my desk into. Luckily, the place I have moved into has nothing in the way of cupboard space, and having rid myself of most of my furniture in order to fit into my last couple of houses, I find myself a little wanting for places to put things.

To begin with, (at least after dumping everything in a big pile in the middle of the room and sleeping on the floor for a couple of weeks) I plotted out my space in SketchUp, and threw in my basic furniture mock ups to get a sense of available space (I am terrible at visual estimations).
Not wanting to spend months building furniture, I cheated a bit and bought myself a swish new wardrobe cabinet (on sale) as it had enough space to store all of my clothes, towels and linen, which accounted for about half of my storage problems.

The other half, was my myriad of textbooks, DVD’s, novels and study materials. Having very limited remaining space, I found myself with a perfect opportunity for a little DIY cabinet making.
Having roughly only 700 by 500 mm of space to work with, I wanted to make as much shelf space as possible, unfortunately 500mm deep shelves seemed a little awkward and unnecessary to me. So, after a bit of mulling, and some cogitating, followed by some measuring of text books, and then a bit more cogitating, I ended up with the idea of a sliding stacked shelf (as shown below). The idea being to maximise shelf frontage, and minimise footprint so not to clutter the room any more than necessary.

The design of the back shelf is to slide into the cabinet when not in use minimising impacted room space.
The result being, as shown below, plenty of shelf, that will tuck neatly into the remaining floor space.

Next thing to do is complete the design, finalise measurements, and figure out how to make the sliding shelf actually slide, and how to stop it from falling off. Part 2 of this project will cover the result.