One of the things I learned at the small house was to look for unused spaces to install shelving. It greatly increased our storage in a house that was very low on storage!
Our small house kitchen did not have any extra food storage. Just the regular kitchen cabinets that we needed to store dishes, pots, pans, etc. So we had to get creative! We did have french doors in the kitchen and a laundry room on the other side. Two of the doors would meet on the same wall, so that wall wasn't used for anything. As our family expanded, we decided we had to do something to create more storage in the kitchen! We decided to take the laundry room door off the door frame. It was a very small room and really didn't need a door. The kitchen door didn't need to open 180 degrees to touch that wall either. We were then able to install shelving to create a pantry. It added so much storage space! Knowing we wanted to sell the house in the next few years, we decided on easily removable shelving since we were aware it was in an odd place. Our realtor ended up telling us to leave the shelving because it added so much space!
If you notice to the left of the shelving, we also added a wrack to hold some of my most used cookbooks as the others were stored in another room. We tried not to waste any space!
To the left of our fireplace was a weird nook that wasn't usable for much other than a floor lamp. Space was too precious to be wasted on that though. We figured out that an odd metal shelving unit my husband had rescued from the trash at work would fit there perfectly. The only issue was it had long metal feet that stood out. So we put a plastic drawer unit under the last shelf to keep toes from getting hurt and to better use the rest of the space. It was used to hold food at one point and in this picture you will see it being used to hold school supplies for our home school.
Although this picture isn't the greatest quality, I wanted to include it to show you that it had lots of possibilities of how to store things. This was an earlier iteration before my youngest joined school.
One of our family members was getting rid of this massive shelving unit at one point so we asked if we could have it. It has held so much over the years while still looking very nice as part of our dining room. I used it to store our printer and pretty bins of office supplies, along with some things you wouldn't suspect. The wicker basket on top actually held cat toys, brushes, and nail clippers. The cabinet on the bottom held most of my cook books. On the other side, we stored plastic tubs of toddler learning toys for my youngest to use during "school time".
Here's an earlier iteration before we moved the school supplies to the other shelving unit. Again, I included this to show it was very versatile.
We used a lot of bookshelves in that house as well. It was a great place to store books and games, as well as puzzles, toys, and magazines if you store them in a bin. In our room, I also stored photographs and old letters in photo boxes on the bookshelves. My husband stored old hard drives and other computer equipment on them. As long as they are sturdy and you use bins, you can store all kinds on things on them.
We also had this closet that was hard to use because it was behind a couch and had the air conditioner in it. We chose to take the door off of it, hang some hooks, and this soft shelving unit in the closet to store games. We stored things we didn't need often in the floor and on the shelf above the rod.
Our laundry room had these shelves already built in, but I still wanted to include them because the were such a great use of storage. We could fit a lot up there. No, they were not usually this neat, but they did hold a lot!
The laundry room also had this empty space above the dryer which was hard to use because of the fuse box. We added these hanging shelves to better use this space. They are not large but can still hold a lot! We stored light bulbs, clothes pins, sticky rollers, trash bags, duct tape, and more.
Here in our current house, we added these shelves where there was just a blank wall in the toilet closet. We keep cleaners for the bathroom, trash bags, extra hand towels, and extra toilet paper up there. Along with a painting, it made that room more homey and very much increased the storage. These shelves are actually from Amazon.
I hope these examples have given you some ideas of where you could use shelves to increase the storage in your home.
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