When you live in Canada, you have a lot of outdoor wear. Winter coats, spring coats, church coats, work coats, boots, shoes, sandals, hats, mittens, gloves....and the list goes on and on. Multiply this by the 6 people in our family and I had a huge mess on my hands.
I tried multiple ways of storing items but had a hard time finding a system that worked. When I put neatly organized bins of hats and mitts in our mudroom bench it was great for about 5 minutes...till it got completely dishevelled after one kid dug through everything to find a missing glove. Trying to store coats in our small front wardrobe had things bursting at the seams. And shoes. Shoes were EVERYWHERE.
We needed some sort of system. Most of our kids are at the age now where they can be responsible for their own items. So, I scoured the internet for ideas on creating some sort of family storage system . Enter the gloriously simple idea of Garage Lockers.
The following two tutorials served as inspiration when we designed our own lockers: (If you're planning to build your own lockers, I highly recommend checking out these tutorials before you start!)
The first tutorial solely uses Ikea Billy Bookcases while the second builds theirs completely from scratch. We wanted a combo of both: the ease of pre-assembled bookcases married with the strength of real wood. And, thus, the Ikea hack!
After we knew what we wanted, I kept my eyes open for Ikea sales. We purchased the skinny Billy Bookcases (Found here: https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/billy-bookcase-white-50263838/) when they were on a mega sale. And then they sat in storage for a few years because...well, life lol. This spring we finally got around to putting them together and designing our lockers.
Building Steps & Tips:
Figure out what you want: It took me a long time to figure out exactly how I wanted the lockers to look. I wanted each person to have their own cubby and shelves, but I also wanted one extra cubby for additional bins. I wanted to the shelving to go right to the ceiling so we wouldn't have wasted space. I didn't care about trimming over the fronts of adjoining cubby walls or hiding the pre-cut sections on the bottom of the outside bookcases because it was just going in our garage. Figure out what you want and run with it. It makes planning out materials to buy so much easier.
Use what you have: I accumulated many bins while I was teaching and wanted to incorporate them to save on cost. Luckily, most of them fit! The small bins are all from Dollorama. Their plastic is a bit thicker and can freeze without cracking which is important because our garage is not heated. Though we have seven cubbies, we only needed 6 bins for shoes. So, we made the bin spots under the bench much wider than the actual cubbies. This ensured I didn't have to buy new, bigger bins and could use the ones I already had.
Assemble the bench: We purchased two 2x10s and cut the length down to 114 inches so it would slightly overhang each side of the bookcases. We also bought enough plywood to cut out 7 pieces that were 18 inches deep by 15 inches tall. These pieces are the dividers between the bottom shoe bins. We painted all the plywood pieces with white trim paint (2 coats) and then sealed them with polyurethane, satin finish. We sanded and joined the two 2x10s with mutiple flat metal plates/brackets like these (https://www.lowes.ca/product/corner-braces/national-hardware-2-in-zinc-plated-mending-plate-98213?&cm_mmc=shopping_google-_-6444651998-_-76957851997-_-pla-904857876679&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6MDPu6n66QIVywiICR1SfgAwEAQYAiABEgIWGfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds). We then stained them in dark walnut and sealed them with several coats of polyurethane, satin finish.
Assemble the bookcases in place: The only difficult part of this project was assembling the bookcases on the wall. Because we needed the backing to start directly at the base of the bookshelf, we couldn't build them with the fixed bottom shelf as stated in the instructions. Instead, we pre-measured 4 small pieces of wood to fit directly behind the bookshelf backing and screwed the outer bookcase walls to this for strength. The tricky part is sliding in the backing before you add the complete top shelf and second shelf side. It was definitely a two person job to hold the backing, nail it to our support pieces of wood, and then add the other side while simultaneously assembling the top shelf. We added an additional small painted board at the base of each backing to make it look more seamless above the bench. Please note: You will not have enough backing to hide everything if you let it sit right on the bottom. It is necessary to slide it all the way to the top. We were able to hide the bottom gap with our two pieces of wood (the back piece for securing the backing and the front painted board to make it look seamless/finished).
Things I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE about the finished product:
Everything has a spot.
Everyone can find their stuff.
Everyone is more responsible for their personal, everyday-use items.
Everyone has an easier time getting ready to head out the door.
Everyone has more time.
Curious how you attached the vertical plywood dividers on the bottom to the 2 x 10s??