We love consulting with clients who bring in their digital vision boards and coming up with designs that make their dreams come true. Deciding to renovate, add-on, or remodel is an exciting time for homeowners. And, while we applaud all of the visions, we also like to focus on the practical elements.
Use a Home Remodel To Add Extra Storage
As long as you’re planning a renovation, home remodel, or an addition, you have an incredible opportunity to create space-saving and storage-adding designs that optimize the home’s functionality.
Here are five interesting ways to add more storage space while simultaneously renovating your home.
1. Use built-in shelving in any room
There’s one reason why built-in shelving went by the wayside in the average new construction subdivision home: they require more time and better craftsmanship. We’re all about personalized design and craftsmanship as custom home builders, so a minuscule delay in buildout yields greater beauty, longevity, and functionality. That means we’re huge fans of built-in shelving.
Built-in shelving is a design “twofer” for homeowners because they don’t take up any air or floor space, but they house, store, and display possessions. These shelves, which can also include a combination of shelving and cabinet doors, are built into interior wall space. Therefore, they’re far more efficient than bookshelves or cabinets you’d set against a wall, and built-ins can be finished, trimmed, and painted to accommodate traditional, transitional, and contemporary design tastes.
The combination of open shelving and closed doors means you can house, display or store:
- Books
- Photos
- Collectible and mementos
- Blankets and linens
- Board games
- Toys
- Pet accessories
- Anything you want out of sight but with easy access
Best of all, built-in shelving can be used in virtually any location, including kitchens, living and family rooms, hallways, children’s bedrooms, and (most especially) home offices or study spaces.
2. Remove soffits in kitchens
If you’re renovating, odds are you live in a home that was built 15 years ago or more. And, unless it was a custom home at the time (and even if it was), chances are high the kitchen has soffits. Removing them gives you exponential space to extend cabinets and increase storage space.
To be clear: soffits are boxy structures, typically extended from the ceiling, that make it easy for contractors to hide HVAC ducts, plumbing, electrical wires, etc., without having to do the extra work of tucking those elements into the interior wall and attic spaces. Usually, soffits extend down from the ceiling and meet flush with the top of the kitchen cabinets. In some cases, soffits may even extend beyond cabinets.
By removing soffits, the kitchen design benefits from:
- A cleaner and more streamlined look
- Redirection and updating of outdated electrical, plumbing, and HVAC equipment
- The ability to redesign cabinetry to be as efficient, space-saving, and storage-rich as possible
Even if you opt not to remove kitchen soffits, we recommend utilizing new trim to spruce things up and minimize their boxy expanse.
As long as we’re on the topic of the kitchen, a few other ways to gain storage space in the kitchen include:
- Extend cabinets to the ceiling
- Revamping the island
- Adding a kitchen island (if you don’t have one already)
- Design storage to accommodate efficient organization of pots/pans, dishes, pantry items, etc.
- Cleanse and declutter the kitchen (this is the time to get rid of all of that old kitchen gadgetry/items you don’t use, minimizing the amount of storage you need at all)
3. Use sliding doors
Since we just came from the kitchen, let’s stay there. Your kitchen design is based on two central, functional tenets. The first is how you use your kitchen (the kitchen triangle formula, for example); the second is what needs to go where to accommodate the swing of refrigerator, oven, dishwasher, and cabinet doors. The same is true for areas in the house with swinging doors.
If you have a door that swings on hinges, you can’t have certain other things. For example, if your bedroom door opens into the bedroom door space, the wall space it open “into” must remain clear, so the door doesn’t hit it. So, if you make smart choices around which doors stay and which doors go, you can replace swinging doors with sliding doors – such as barn doors or pocket doors. This transforms what you can do with significant sections of wall space.
When we open wall space and floor space in a home, we make it possible to creatively design and plan for more storage.
4. Build a loft space
Do you have ceilings that are 8-feet tall or higher? If so, consider whether your home remodel would benefit from a loft space in one or more rooms. Lofts can be built to virtually any height/width you want and have multiple access options. In addition to creating extra square footage for any room that has one, lofts can serve multiple functions, such as:
- An extra sleeping space
- A cozy nook
- The space for toys and games
- A study/homework space
- Extra storage space
- The library
Your home remodel contractor can talk to you more about which rooms or spaces are the most accommodating for a loft design.
5. Be open to moving things around
It’s true that leaving things in place – particularly with regards to plumbing and electrical equipment – is the most affordable home remodeling route. That said, it doesn’t mean your home’s design is the most efficient, functional, and storage-friendly for your family.
Your home remodel or renovation provides the opportunity to sit down with design/build experts who can rethink your home layout in newer and better ways. It may be that the very act of moving things around and re-envisioning the layout of the rooms in your home and the layout of functional spaces like the kitchen and bathrooms to optimize storage.
Interested in seeing how your home remodel offers interesting ways to increase or improve storage? We would love to be a part of that process. Schedule a consultation with Fogle Constructors. Our consultations are 100% no obligation. You won’t need a signed contract to start a conversation with us. Even so, we’ll help you think through your project’s scope, budget, and more.
