Under-the-stairs Storage

[Chris Padilla]

I know I've been incognito lately so I'm attempting a comeback and to show you I wasn't just lazying about and such, I bring a project!

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This is the before shot from like 2007. I don't have one totally finished with trim and such.

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I removed the superfluous drywall to remember what I had to work with. Back in 2009 or so, I redid my whole garage. That coil of wire a sharp-eyed feller might see is from then--I tossed it in there as I had access below the landing separating the two stair cases. The space is my little cubby-hole in the garage. Now that wire would finally come in handy!

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Pulling superfluous studs and adding in a makeshift beam that probably wasn't necessary but made it easier to build out the space for drywall later on, was next on the list.

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Got 'er wired up with a nice box for the LOML's vacuum cleaner (ain't I sweet?! Hey, this wall has needed an outlet since the day we moved in in 1999!) and all drywalled in ready to go.

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A shot of the underside where the real noodling took place. I piled a few moving blankets on the floor there and stared up at the underside of the stairs and monkeyed around for a quite a spell trying to figure out how to support a sheet of sheetrock coplanar 'n stuff. It turned out fine in the end after a few trial and error sessions.

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Weeeeellllllllllllllll after some further thinking and talking to the wife, I decided to redo the original thought of the step in the drywall to contain the 'drawer front' of the sliding storage box. It would be much cleaner and easier this way. There went $10 worth of 1/2" rock down the tubes!!

So next was mudding, taping, skip-trowel finish and some paint and then onto the storage bins!

[Chris Padilla]

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Here is the left bin, all 'Kreg'ed' together but not yet sanded, edges sealed, etc.

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Right bin shaping up. Oh, did you catch it there in the upper left corner of the picture?

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So here are the bin fronts. I would've liked to have tortured myself by using the fronts as part of the box frame bin thingy but I thought, nah...next time. So I made separate fronts to attach to the sliding storage bins and got 'em to fit just how I wanted. They are just standing on edge in there not attached to anything. You can see the handles as well...but not the final handles. These just represented where I (well, my wife) wanted to put drawer pulls. We just sort of eyeballed them into a spot that sorta looked right to us. Being on a weird angle and such, the placement was a little funny. I think they ultimately ended up in the "center of mass" of the fronts.

The Handles
So the handles took a bit of thinking a searching to figure out. For starters, we didn't want anything sticking out as it just wouldn't look right. Searching and pondering several embedded type of drawer pulls, I wasn't happy with how any of them attached. For a 'drawer' that would be quite large, bulky, and heavy, I didn't think any of them would last very long.

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Then I got to thinking about a finger-pull bit one can route. We settled on the bottom right bit from CMT because I wanted it to be as large as possible--one needs to get a whole hand's worth of finger in there to give a good pull to open these babies. One issue I saw right away was the depth. I'm using 3/4" plywood and the pull needed at least an 1" (preferably more if possible) of depth. This was no problem since I was basically attaching the 'drawer front' to the 'drawer box' and that gave me 1.5" of material depth to work with! COOLIO!

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So I face glued some 4/4 poplar I had laying around and proceeded to make some cuts with the finger-pull bit. I hogged out some wood first with the biggest straight-bit I had and then cut the finger-pull.

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A couple shots of the finger-pull cutter's results.

[Chris Padilla]

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Viola! I now have a nice, strong, embedded, flush handle for the bins! It took a fair bit of sanding to flush everything up and to get some of the burn marks out but this whole thing is being painted so little mess-ups are quite easy to forgive.

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Now the next fun was to work on cutting out the drawer fronts to accept the handle nice 'n snug. Porter Cable templet bushings were the way I went.

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Sticky-taped the guide down, did an initial route, then cut out the superfluous material with the jig-saw...then finished routing a nice clean hole.

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Not bad! A little putty and sanding and we'll be good to go!

[Chris Padilla]

So the rest after this is pretty bland: sanding, fill, sanding, paint...bolt the slides on...add trim. Done.

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[Jim Becker]

Great idea, Chris, and very nice execution. It's nice that things "disappear" visually, too.

[Andrew Hughes]

Very cool Chris I like it.

[Christopher Charles]

Excellent, good idea. I especially like the pulls.

[Chris Padilla]

Thanks, Folks! The next debate is whether or not we want the drawer fronts skip-troweled/textured like the rest of the wall. LOML is still pondering this but I suspect as time goes by, she'll get used to it and I won't have to do it although, admittedly, I think it will serve to blend them further.

[Jim Tobias]

Very Nice! I love it when form meets function in a meaningful way.

Great idea and execution.

Jim

[Chris Padilla]

By the way, the storage is completely full of................SHOES! LOL!
That's what happens when you have a wife and daughter.
But at least the hall closet is now cleaned out and easier to navigate.