When you have a shop in a relatively small basement storage space is at a premium. I’m constantly looking for ways to add more storage or in this case make the storage I have more usable. The top shelf in the storage behind the basement stairs has been an evolution from open shelves to a set of flat deep drawers and now to make the top shelf more effective pull out shelf organizers. The problem was that if anything went to the back of this 24 inch deep shelf it would be very hard to access. I saw a great deal on Amazon for Blum TANDEM under-mount slides and I’d been watching someone on YouTube making pull out shelves for a kitchen pantry and this gave me the idea to make a bunch of pull out shelves for the shop.

Three of the units are six inches wide and two are nine inches wide. The front three are 18 inches tall and the back two are 15 inches and 14 inches tall respectively. They are all 21 inches deep. The end panels are 3/4 inch natural birch plywood and the top, bottom and shelves are 1/2 inch natural birch plywood. The rails to keep stuff from coming off the shelves are 1/4” natural birch plywood.

The construction is just rabbets top and bottom and dados to support the shelves. I used glue and 15 gauge finish nails ( I love my Milwaukee cordless 15 gauge finish nailer, it is fantastic ). The back of each cabinet is nailed and glued on.

The TANDEM under-mount slides are pretty easy to work with except for one tiny oversight on my part, there is a minimum drawer width because the levers and mechanism to connect the cabinet to the rails have a fixed width and I was just under it with the six inch wide cabinets. I was able to work around it by modifying the bottom of the six inch cabinets so it all worked out.

I also had to reduce the height of the furthest back cabinet because the spacing between units wasn’t as tight as I’d estimated. I was able to just slice the top off of the unit and make it into an open topped roll-out, just like I had designed it that way to clear the pipe going over it.

All in all they work great, pull out smoothly, soft close, clear everything around them and have made that space very usable. I even have some “baby fat” as Adam Savage calls it, extra storage that is empty. That won’t last long.

One of the first projects I did after I retired was to replace an old broken down bench with large shelves for storage. It was a good improvement to the shop and did fine service for the last couple of years. However, in two years I’ve acquired more tools and as I filled up that shelf I realized that it was messy and inefficient for getting to things without having to move everything else. Then I was watching an Adam Savage YouTube video of one of his one-day builds to make Flat File Tool Storage and I saw the solution to both problems. Additionally I realized that much of the stock for the project could come from my off cut pile, which needed cleaning out in any case.

The space I had available in the middle shelf next to my bench was 45” x 24” x 13” this included clearance to have the drawers come out and not run into things on the pegboard on one side and to not interfere with my clamp storage on the other side. I decided to split the space down the middle and make five two inch drawers on the left and three three and a half inch drawers on the right. Originally they were going to be all the same width but due to a mistake I made while routing a dado in the top and bottom ( which it turns out I didn’t need anyway ) I ended up making the three and a half inch drawers a little narrower.

I wrestled with going out and buying a compressor and a brad nail gun to assemble the sides and drawers like Adam Savage does ( I often joke to myself that his projects are 80% brads by the end… ) But, for good or ill I just decided to use some short wood screws, a rabbet on the front and rear panels, and glue to hold stuff in place. The looks didn’t really matter to me for something that was going to be in the shop.

I did get slightly fancy and put on drawer fronts and trim around the installation both for looks and to help reduce the sawdust that could get in on the tools and drawer slides. I also broke down and labeled all the drawers in the shop (and even some bins) to help remind me where things lived.

I used the drawer installation method that I’ve seen Jimmy Diresta do and which I’m sure many others have done where you screw the slides to the drawer and then you line everything up in the opening and slide the drawer forward on some spacer/support sticks and screw in the slides. It definitely works great for getting them aligned nicely and for stacks of drawers where you want nice tight consistent spacing.

After it was installed it triggered a review of where all my tools were stored and a bunch of sorting and culling which was also good for the shop. I got rid of a bunch of broken stuff that I had to finally admit I wasn’t going to fix/adapt/use in any reasonable future. It also flattened out the retrieval for a lot of tools making them more usable because I wasn’t meeting the resistance of having to claw through a pile to get to them.

I’m really happy with how this came out and it is a big upgrade for the quality of life in my shop!

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