In May, I retired with 37 years of service in the Air Force. It was an amazing career with 20 years of active duty service and 17 years as an Air Force civilian. Over the past ten years, we’ve been working on a cabin in the woods to retire to. One of the challenges was making our 2200 sq ft house full of stuff fit in our 1000 sq ft cabin. These past few months, prior to the move, I’ve been trying to solve that problem with many different storage options — from a tiny shadow box to a storage space big enough for my bikes. Attached are some of my recent projects to help us fit into our new space. I started by building some new cabinets for the kitchen with handy pull-out shelves. Also, for the kitchen, I built a cabinet for our trash can; having a dog means closing up the trash. In our living space, we had a corner that was basically wasted — now it’s storage for blankets and other little-used items. Right above the corner cabinet is a small set of shelves for our DVD collection (yep, we might be a little old school). I built a small cabinet for random items that we need to access easily for our front room. All the pieces in the cabin are made with hickory and walnut to match all the other items I’ve made over the years. I also built a package box for any deliveries we receive. It mostly keeps our packages from getting wet, but it might also deter the average thief. And while the photo attached is of the bike shop under construction, it is actually complete and packed with bikes!
