Basement Renovation: Built-In Storage

Like most basements, we’ve used ours for storing things we don’t use everyday. It’s also become the “I don’t have the energy to deal with this, so throw it in the basement” spot, so now it’s very full and completely disorganized.

As part of our basement bedroom work, we did a decent clean-up of the basement, removing garbage and obvious things that we didn’t need.

But now we need somewhere to put all this stuff and I’ve planned (for a long time now) to build some beautiful storage under the basement stairs.

I was inspired by several modern under-the-stair storage ideas:

We were so happy with our kitchen millwork, that we decided to go full custom again. I had toyed with getting Ikea PAX wardrobes and trying to make it look custom, but there were a few tricky bits, including the face of the basement stairs, that made it worth doing it properly. Plus, I would have lost a lot of potential depth if I had used PAX, so it didn’t seem worth it. We needed every inch of storage we could get!

As part of the basement bedroom project, I also finished all the drywalling I’d need for the millwork to be installed.

The storage design had a few tricky bits, including the face of the stairs, a pocket door for the bedroom and a way to vent the laundry machines.

To make the stair face, the millworkers came and made a template of the stairs to fit exactly. For the pocket door, we had to choose a good location for the door jamb so it didn’t look awkward. And for the laundry machines, I liked the idea of drilling holes in the doors at the top and bottom in a clean, grid pattern.

When the cabinets were installed, the basement was really starting to come together.

The pocket door was probably the most complicated to install, taking almost a full day by our installation team. In the end, it was a beautiful door and well worth the trouble!

As part of the millwork, we also included the closets in the basement bedroom, which were made up of an Ikea PAX wardrobe and a mechanical room.

I’m particularly proud of how great this one looks! You can’t tell it’s a mechanical closet!

Once the cabinets were in, I organized all of our stuff into various Sterilite boxes and it now looks amazingly organized. Marie Kondo, eat your heart out.

I still find it so exciting to see an idea come to life!