Part of my home shop is located in my garage. I still park my car in the garage, so things get set up in there and then put away after a project. There is also a lot of storage for outdoor tools most importantly my long ladder for getting to the second story of my house on the rare occasions I am required to. My stock of wood was also stored there on the top shelf behind the ladder in a very inconvenient pile. Most of the time I have to essentially take all of it out to get to the wood I want and then put it all back. This time I decided to fix this problem. For reference here is a before picture:
In order to fix this problem I needed to find a place to put the ladder. After walking around my house multiple times I realized that there was a huge space under my front porch that would store the ladder just fine. I fortunately had some scraps of the Azec trim from when it was built so I could just cut out a section of lattice and turn that into a door with some 1x4 stock as the frame and a 2x4 backer for the door jamb with some trim. It was a little weird because the bottom of the porch side follows the grade so the door is a parallelogram not a square or rectangle. I managed to get it roughly the right shape and then I trimmed the whole door on the table saw to fit.
Now that I could stash the ladder in there I could cut off the uprights that the ladder had hung off of giving me unobstructed access to the top shelf. On the right side I installed a Rockler 4-tier Wood Rack which was easy to just screw onto the existing 2x4 supports. I put the “nice” wood, the maple, walnut and cedar on that rack. Then on the other side of the window (which you will now be able to see and the shop will get natural light too…) I built a 24” deep, 48” long, 31” high wood sorter with dividers every 6.5”. It is just quickly screwed together out of scrap wood that I had and some 2x4’s. The hardest part was getting it from the floor up to the shelf… it is firmly screwed to the shelf. Then I could sort my smaller wood off-cuts by size and quality and access any of them without moving anything.
I also moved some other things that could live outside to the new storage. Here’s what the new arrangement looks like:
There’s more cleaning up of the other shelves to come but the wood situation is solved.