Scrap Lumber Rack for a Tricky Room

This is a rack I just built to hold scrap wood (lumber and sheet good offcuts). I designed it to fit at the back of a narrow (6’ wide) storage room next to our garage. To make things worse, there’s a utility sink on the short back wall where I needed to put the rack, and there are wire shelves running along the long adjacent wall (behind the rack),  so space is very limited. Fortunately, the room has a 10-foot ceiling, so I had plenty of vertical space.

My rack was loosely inspired by  Matthew Peech’s Easy DIY Lumber Storage Solution For ANY Garage and by Barb’s (BB1’s) variation of it. Initially, I planned to use a smaller version of his rack, but it would have butted up right to the side of the sink (as if the sink were in a small alcove). That setup wouldn’t work for my wife. She tends to stand at the corner of the sink instead of directly in front of it, and she needs some clearance on its left for moving buckets or watering cans. It also had some other issues, so it wouldn’t work out after all.

I sketched out a few other variations before settling on the design I built. It’s 39” wide, 24” deep, and about 8 1/2’ tall. It provides four types of storage for various types of scraps:

The bin for long offcuts nestles under the room’s lower wire shelf when the rack is stowed. In that position, I have full access to the sloped front and horizontal shelves, and the rack is far enough from the sink to let us use it. When I need to access the long-offcut bin, I roll the cart forward about a foot. (I’ll need to relocate those roller stands; they’re going to get in the way.) When stowed, the rack limits access to the last two feet of the wire shelves, so we store seldom-used items there.

 

For that dual-position approach to work, the rack must roll easily, smoothly, and straight. To  ensure that, I mounted it on six large, fixed casters. I found heavy-duty ones on clearance at Grizzly.com for less than $8 each, so I ordered six. They’re Steelex D2554 fixed casters without brakes. (I’m not providing a link because I assume the product page will soon disappear from their website.) The wheels are 4” in diameter and 2” wide, with a weight capacity of 550 lbs. per caster. I wish I had ordered one with a brake to place at the near front corner, because the floor slopes down slightly toward the sink, and the rack tends to roll forward. For now, I just use a block of wood as a chock to keep the rack in place. If it ends up being a nuisance, I’ll fabricate some type of flip/sliding stop.

To save money, I decided to use construction lumber and hardboard instead of plywood. The rack required fourteen 2x4’s and two sheets of 3/16” thick hardboard. (I had intended to use 1/8” hardboard, and it would have worked just as well and saved me $20. I just didn’t pay close attention when I bought the sheets and  didn’t notice my mistake until after I had the sheets cut in half to fit into my car.) I used pocket holes (almost 300!) to assemble the frame and 1-1/4” construction screws to attach the hardboard panels. The total cost ended up around $200, which is more than I had hoped, but not too bad considering the high cost of everything these days.

I discarded a few scraps (enough to fill two small shipping boxes), but I managed to fit the rest into the rack. While loading it, I noticed a few issues I still need to address. First, I’ll probably need to add some dividers to the long-offcut bin to organize and secure the scraps there. Second, I realized that a lot of my scraps are short. That’s good, because they will fit on the shelves. It’s also bad, because storing short scraps on a 24” deep shelf either wastes space or requires storing some scraps behind others, which makes them hard to find and access. To address that, my wife found these trays on the web. They’re 24” deep and 4” tall. I plan to store my short scraps in them, and they’ll sit beside or above longer scraps on the shelves. I think they’ll be very useful, sort of like deep drawers.

The long scraps stored on the right side need to be protected from water splashes from the sink. For now, I’m covering them with a 24” x 48” piece of hardboard. I also considered adding some type of bungee-fastened tarp wrapping from the back frame around to the front, or a tarp anchored at the top of the rack and extending down to the rack’s front lip. I’ll see if the hardboard piece is sufficient, though.

Time will tell if this rack is an improvement over my old setup. At the very least, it enabled us to reorganize the storage room and free up some shelf space. I’m convinced that there’s no perfect one-rack solution, but I tried to come up with the best compromise that works for me. I think the real answer is my being more selective about which scraps I keep.

For more background, design, and construction details, please see the corresponding blog series and the SketchUp models of the rack and the room at 3D Warehouse. (As with all of my models, it's best to navigate the model by viewing different scenes--Scenes > My Scenes inside the SketchUp viewer.) Thanks for reading!