DIY Kitchen Wall Storage
This little shelving unit is for the blank wall that’s on many sides of refrigerators or cabinets and turning it into a vertical storage space. In my case, we had an exposed side of floor to ceiling cabinets that was the first thing you would see when you walked into our kitchen. This storage solution is made to take up almost no square footage, while also being used to store tall and thin items vertically such as cutting boards, books, and dishes.
I had been seeing versions of this kitchen storage all over Pinterest, but I hadn't seen one that looked perfect for my space. So I took ideas from other people’s builds and designed my own! This is not a step by step tutorial, but rather an inspiration to help you design and build your own!
Determine how you want this space to be used.
It was important for me, for these shelves to look built in and as seamless as possible with the rest of the cabinets. I did this by making the shelves line up with the rest of the cabinets as much as possible. The shelves go all the way to the edge of the cabinets on one side, and all the way to the wall on the other. I also made sure there were no railing or other wood protruding from the frame of the shelves.
I also wanted to bring warmth into the kitchen with these shelves because the rest of our kitchen is all white and gray. I did this by staining the wood instead of painting it to match the cabinets. (this might change later as we add warmth in other ways)
Then I determined where I wanted each shelf to go, by deciding what items I want to store on the shelves and figuring out how much space they would need. You will also need to decide how deep you want the shelves to be, this will depend on the items you want to sit on the shelves and on how far you want your shelves to protrude from your cabinet/wall.
Gather supplies.
There are four parts to this shelf unit: The frame (includes the top and bottom shelves and the two side pieces"), the shelves, the lips and the rails.
You want the lips to keep items from falling off the shelf, and the railing adds extra security for more breakable or extra large items. We put lips on all of the shelves, but I decided to only do railings on the two tallest shelves. I was worried that if I put the railing on the with the shelves with the smaller gaps, the amount of wood would be overwhelming, especially with wooden cutting boards sitting on the shelves.
You can decide how think you want all your pieces to be, make sure you think about the boards depth when taking you measurements.
Start building!
Start by making your frame. Connect your top shelf, bottom shelf, and side pieces. We used pocket hole screws on one side of the shelving unit because this side was going to be exposed. The other side would be up against the wall so we drilled directly through the side.
Depending on your situation, you could go ahead and install the frame, and add the rest of the pieces after. For us, we wanted as many screw holes to be hidden by the wall as possible so we waited to install the shelving unit until every piece was attached.
Attach the shelves, at the appropriate spacing, again we used a combination of pocket hole screws and regular screws.
We then attached the lip pieces from the bottom of the shelves. We tried using a nail gun, but the nails kept poking through the wood since the space was so narrow. We resorted to continuing using screws throughout.
Lastly attach the rails! We were not able to hide the screw holes for the rails, because they had to be attached from the side frame pieces, but it turned out to not be very noticeable!
Time for instalation!
We were quite nervous to drill into our cabinets, but we did it anyway! We were able to drill from the inside of the cabinets into the left frame piece. and we pocket hole screwed the right frame piece into the wall side of the cabinet. After the unit was attached, I filled in all the holes with wood filler, then sanded it all down with sand paper. After some stain, and polyurethane, we were done!
Style it!
Time for the fun part! Add your cutting boards, dishes, and cook books! This shelving unit, not only adds storage, but it adds so much visual interest to what was a blank wall.
