Tool cabinet organizing

When I organized the closet in the office I was left with some empty space in the entry tambour. The place used to hold our camping and sailing gear.

The space is right at the ceiling level so it's not very easily accessible. But our tools cabinet is packed with stuff and there are things we do not need that often, so those could be stored there.

Here is what the tools cabinet looked before the organizing. It's located right under the cabinet you are seeing above.

It was jam packed. I had organized it earlier, but there were so many things and so tightly that when ever we tried to take anything from there we had to move out other things that were on the way and it was just not very handy. All the stuff was so hard to put back in place so as a result some tools had accumulated in the entrance.

I cleared out all the stuff from the cabinet, except the first shelf, that has car maintenance stuff. I picked out all things that we don't use often. Also we used to have the Dremel and the drill in their original boxes which was a pain. I removed them from the boxes and desided (well, that was actually A's idea) to store them separately.

After I got those out of the way I started to organize the actual tools cabinet. I organized all the tools into piles just to see how many different items we had. I did throw out some things and put few things to the donation bin. For instance we had gazillion hex head wrenches, I threw most of them to the metal recycling bin.

The cabinet is quite deep and I really had to think things through to make even the stuff in the back accessible. To one shelf I desided to add a shelf that was only about 20 cm /8 in deep. I had used that type of narrow shelf in my clothes cabinet and I had found it to be real convenient. I did not have any shelf board at home but I did have some planks. I attached two planks side by side, to make an appropriately deep shelf.

I didn't bother to paint the shelf, this is a tools cabinet after all. It does not need to be pretty.

Also I made a chest of drawers from two shoe boxes. I happened to have two similar shoe boxes.

Then I filled the cabinet again. And ofcourse labeled everything. Here is the after. I'm quite pleased with the shelf with the red box, it has even some extra room and some handy temporary set down area.

Here is one detail. The cabinet is originally meant as a clothes cabinet so it had a clothes rack. We've found it's handy for the saws. We just push the saw between the rack and the above shelf and they stay there quite nicely. The depth of the cabinet is just right for the regular saws, the japanise saw is a bit longer so it's stored in an angle.