Want more storage without adding a new room to your home?

Whether you are building a new home or remodeling, you can never have too much storage. You could buy furniture specifically designed for storage (china cabinets, dressers) but then you would have that much more to dust and vacuum around ... and besides, you may not have room for more furniture.

Or, you could install “built-ins” which stay with the house and increase its resale value. Design as much storage as possible into your remodeling project or new home. Custom built-ins can be economical, attractive, functional and best of all, make your life easier.

Well designed built-ins can provide convenient storage in every room and contain clutter. Built-ins make small rooms seem larger and more open because they are attached to the walls and take up less floor space.

Instead of a wall between rooms, consider a partition with built-in storage and display shelves as in the photo, left. Tim and Tracy built the glass-door cases to separate the entry foyer from the living room while preserving the openness of the large room.

Custom built-ins can fit an oddly shaped corner or a closet you want to open up. Your furniture may be arranged around the focal point of a fireplace (above and left) yet you want to be able to watch movies without rearranging. Solve this dilemma with a built in media center flanking the fireplace. Combine the media cabinets with display shelves for a beautiful and functional living room focal point. The media center cabinets hide the television and any other clutter when not in use.

You’ll need plenty of built-in storage in a craft room, often located near the kitchen or in the laundry room or garage. No matter what your craft or hobby (sewing, woodworking, scrapbooking, etc) you can get customized drawer and cabinet inserts to fit your supplies and tools perfectly. Consider the benefits of being that organized!

Other possible built-ins to consider for your home are a bedroom storage wall or built-in dressers, window seat benches that double as storage with recessed bookcases on the sides, a bookcase wall with media center, mud room storage benches and wall-hung cubbies, wardrobes to organize your closets, a snack bar, wet bar or coffee bar in the family room, a dining booth and a built-in desk near the kitchen (left,) a craft room storage wall with workbench, drawers and display cases, bookshelves under the stairway, dining room wall hutch or display niches for art, recessed between wall studs.

This custom built dining room hutch (left) by Timothy's Fine Woodworking, leaves plenty of room to expand the table for large dinner parties. The hutch has in-cabinet lights to highlight the china collection as well as lots of practical storage.

There are almost endless possibilities for making more effective use of the space in your home by adding built-ins. Take advantage of the numerous cabinetmakers and woodworkers in your city or town, who can customize your home with built-in furniture, storage cabinets and display shelves. To find a woodworker who can work with you on custom built-ins, start with your local phone directory listings under “Cabinets” or “Furniture Designers & Custom Builders.”

Tim J Carney

Why build a prototype?

(by the way, if you want to see any of the photos on this site enlarged, just click on them)

When I design and create a custom piece of furniture such as this dining chair, I have several steps. After initial concept sketches, I draw the piece to scale. My second step is to use the scaled drawing to make a prototype -- or full-scale model -- of the chair. With the prototype I can test-drive the piece to make sure it is comfortable, sized correctly and most importantly, to refine the lines and forms of the design. The third step is building the actual chair. I guess there is a fourth step: making sure my customers are satisfied!

The photo above is the first version of the prototype for an armless dining chair. After contemplating the model for a day, taking it home and letting Maureen sit in it and give me her opinion, I decided to make a few changes to the chair. I change the prototype to make sure I am 100% satisfied before gluing up and cutting the walnut and curly maple I will use for the final piece.

As you can see, the prototype is very rough -- for instance, the joints are not faired the way they will be in the final chair. I don't use glue for the prototype - the joints are mechanical or fitted with screws. This makes it easy for me to take the model apart to make adjustments.

Dining Chair Sketch
Originally uploaded by timcarney.

Although I was planning to fair out the chair legs anyway, I noticed from the prototype that I wanted to make the legs and seat of the chair more graceful, slightly more curved and rounded out than I had originally drawn in my sketch. I also immediately knew that I wanted the crest rail to have a more pronounced curve and that the balance between the hard lines and soft lines of the chair needed some tweaking. The joints of a prototype are extremely rough -- I leave extra wood at the joints on the model. But having this new design sitting in front of me -- in three dimensions made it a lot easier for me to see where I needed to make the transition points between hard and soft, and around the joints, have a more graceful flow.

All of the changes I thought of making after seeing and trying out the prototype are subtle changes, but it's those subtle, almost invisible qualities of a piece of custom furniture that make the difference between a hohum or unattractive piece and a piece that really has soul, a beautiful well-crafted piece of furniture.

I make prototypes whenever I am working on a piece of furniture that's totally new to me. The extra time it takes me to build a full size model is well worth it in the end results.

This (photo above) is the first go-round of refinements to the chair model. I'll post more pictures of our refinements, and the finished chair as the work progresses. Thanks for stopping by my website and we'd sure appreciate it if you want to leave a comment, feedback, or ask any questions.

-- Tim J. Carney


(my editor insisted on putting this pile in, just for fun.)
More views of the refined prototype: