Handyman Saturday - Building a Drop Station
1. R&D Phase
Personal clutter can be bad enough on your person, but take it home, dump it in a pile with the personal gear of your spouse and children, and what you have is an eight-foot disaster area.
That’s why I’m building a drop station for all of the stuff that comes and goes along with my family in and out our front door. This will be a wooden locker/shelving hybrid piece of furniture. We have already moved the washer and dryer out of a very small room at the front of our house, out to the garage. Now, there is more room to move about and fold laundry, and a perfect room for shoes, keys, purses, diaper bags, hats, wallets, cell phones, and all the other stuff we drag home.
We are currently in the Research and Development phase. This is to determine exactly what kind of storage unit I will build, how many shelves, hooks and shoe cubbies that will be needed. I have set up a small table in the old laundry room and the daily essentials will get moved in - keys, wallet or purse, cell phone, diaper bag. Everything else is undergoing evaluation. If we need it enough that it needs to go on the drop station, then it gets added to the list, so a location for it can be added to the drop station design.
The basic structure will be four doorless, locker-like sections, each about 16″ across. Shelves around eye-level for keys, etc. Hooks below that for coats and bags, and square cubicles at the bottom for shoes. But since I’m building this from scratch, it seemed only right that each section should be optimized for its owner. My wife and I are done growing, and fairly set in our habits. So our sections will be permanently fixed. The kids however, are young (23 months and T-minus 7 months) so they have a lot of growing and changing to do, so shelves and hooks on those two sections will be adjustable, to grow with the kids.
So I have a basic design, but this research phase will help us unclutter, rather than just moving the clutter, and better optimize the new space to make all of the essentials easy to see, store, and retrieve.