Even if you have a large home, you may have a small space. Maybe it’s your laundry room, or a spare bedroom, or even a bathroom. I am starting a series that will focus on small space solutions and out of the box ideas to help you deal with this conundrum.
My first “out of the box” idea was applied in a living room. The homeowners have a decent size home but they have an open floor plan living room/dining room space that makes it seem really large but in reality it’s a bit small to serve 2 purposes.
The clients wanted storage as well as cabinetry that would help to anchor the TV in its space and fill a large wall with a tall ceiling. Unfortunately once the furniture was in place, it did not leave room for traditional cabinetry and certainly not the built-ins that they wanted.
I suggested using upper kitchen cabinets (that are only 12″ deep) as base cabinets. Now, they could have just had narrow custom cabinets made, but that would have been extremely costly. Upper kitchen cabinets come in a variety of sizes including 30″ tall which is the height of a lot of traditional built-ins. We built a base for them to sit on, had a top fabricated out of wood and trimmed it out with toe kick to give it a clean look. Then we installed shelving above to help the TV fade into the background when not in use.
This application also gave life to an extremely large blank wall. The homeowner filled the shelves with her favorite things and surrounded it with artwork. And as a bonus, more storage! And it didn’t cost a fortune.
