Christine-

This is one wall in my sewing room, I store WIPs in the baskets. It's easy to grab a basket and work on whatever I want to work on for the day. My sewing room is actually the former formal living room, which means it's right by the front door. I feel compelled to keep it somewhat tidy.



Another wall in my sewing room...

Iceblossom

Still working on organization issues in the new house but progress made today. During the process of moving, I would say "I'm going from a full room to a closet worth of fabric". So here's a look at what that means. I wanted storage out of direct light and the house as a whole had a lack of storage. The downstairs was just a large open space. I had two closets built, in perfect world I would have been able to put in (2) 48" sets of shelves, but I was just under that in available space due to the doorway into the former family/now sewing room. I didn't want built in shelving because I want there to be flexibility moving forward in what goes in there. My overall goal is to use up fabric and not have space for more and more -- as tempting at that may be.

One thing I didn't take into consideration was how much space the folding doors took in the opening. I hadn't planned on needing to roll the storage. Yes the totes stack and maybe I didn't need shelves but it seems that whatever tote I want to look in is always at the bottom of the stack and I wanted shelves.

Today we put the super heavy duty rolling casters on the shelving unit -- it would have been easier to put them on when we built the shelves but I was feeling dimensionally challenged at the time and wasn't sure we would have enough height clearance. It wasn't that hard to put them on today and whew! what a relief to find that it can still roll in and out just fine. Not a lot of top clearance but enough. When we weighed the fabric before moving we found a full tote was about 30 pounds. We could have probably gotten away with casters rated for a 500 pound load but I decided to over-engineer and go with the next size up which is a 2k limit!

You might notice that I didn't put the top shelf on the top of the unit. Couple of reasons for that, one being that I have short arms and can't reach that high, the other being I wanted to keep things on the shelf and not have to clear off the top if I wanted to slide the unit out of the closet instead of just side to side in the closet. It is a heavy load but I am able to roll it ok with a little ooomph!

Picture 1 shows the built closets and one of the few pieces of furniture I moved. Not sure if the credenza will stay there, I have a more usable size/height/depth table and will either need the credenza to store my collection of dishes, or buy a hutch, or get rid of dishes...

Picture 2 shows the shelves with fabric totes -- yay me! And thanks to the hubby that helped.

Iceblossom

Ack! 2nd try at adding the pix.

quiltingcandy

Totally understand the reason for shelves. I did the same in my sewing room closet. The tote you need is always on the bottom, so being able to pull it off a shelf is so much easier. My closet has sliding doors which I wish weren't there. They are so big - the full length of the wall, 3 very heavy doors. Removed one once but it was a bigger pain storing it - in case, we would want it in the future.

WMUTeach

Looks wonderful, IB. Good planning makes for good results.

retiredteacher09

Iceblossom: Congratulations on your new storage! It looks great!

Quiltah Mama

Nice storage, that shelving unit is a great option, as you mentioned,so much easier then stacking the totes. Helps with the motivation too when you know you can wheel the unit out, pull the exact tote you want and start to design that next project.👍