Space Saving Technologies for the Home?

An anonymous reader asks: "My wife & I are moving from an 1800 square foot apartment to a 900 square foot apartment this weekend. In order to keep our one size extravagance, a 6' x 6' table, we need to make some compromises. What can I do to solve this problem? What other great space-saving solutions with technology are there?" "The first compromise we've made is books. All of my O'Reilly books, and any other book that we can access on Safari is being given away or sold. I've also gotten rid of my outdated tech manuals, except for the VMS books, and historically significant UNIX books.

I've also disposed of all my desktops. My wife is keeping hers, but all I really need is a portable laptop stand which can mount an LCD screen, and my PowerBook.

Now comes the Living Room -- our entertainment center takes up way too much space. 400 DVDs, 100 videos, and countless CDs. We're going to rip all of the CDs, for sure. We're also going to get rid of our television and replace it with a wall-mounted LCD.

This leaves an important question: Digital Media Centers. I've seen a lot of half-there DIY digital media centers involving MythTV or Windows Media Center Edition. I just haven't seen the right solution. The right solution to me needs to allow me to easily rip and encode (though I'd be happy just ripping, because I don't want to sacrifice quality for space. I have 10 400GB hard drives laying in my office waiting for a use)."

Comments

Re:Efficient furniture [and shelving!]

[DeanPentcheff]

Spend quality time meticulously planning shelving in your closets. You can get far more shelves in than you initially suspect, if you're careful about the layout. Check the "ShelfTrack"-based shelving from Closetmaid (the white wire shelving available at Home Depot) -- http://www.closetmaid.com/ . You mount one horizontal bracket near the ceiling (i.e. on the wood of the header behind the wallboard there), and the vertical supports hang on that -- hence no searching for studs.

Plan on shelves closer than you normally might: you won't want things stacked more than a foot deep on the shelves, anyway, so you can get them 18" apart (vertically) for almost all things.

Another advantage is that the wire allows for air circulation, keeping things from molding (if that can be a problem for you).

Re:Stacking

[D'Sphitz]

Drawers are ok for small crap, but shelving is great if you're not worried about aesthetics. I have a small apartment, but I like my stuff. I have twelve 6' utility shelves lining the walls and four 4' in the closets. They're pretty cheap ($20ish each at WalMart) and everything has a place, figure i've probably quadrupled the storage capacity of this apartment.

great space saving technology!

[West VA Flamer]

milk crates, put stuff in 'em and stack those bitches up. very little overhead for how much space they take up and free if you take them from behind a 7-11. also great for organization, just use a label maker over the logo of the company of who it used to belong too. sturdy too!

Re:Space Bags

[rusty0101]

Yes. With caveats.

Yes they do allow you to compress things and as a result save space. However... ...they are too easy to get a hole in, at which point they are simply a bag with a bunch of stuff in them. ...they cost far too much for the space savings they provide. ...if you leave something in these bags for an extended period of time, plan on washing it when it comes out. If for no other reason than to get rid of the wrinkles, though my experience is that something ends up in the bag that propogates smell to everything else as well.

A cheaper alternative is to pick up some clear 35 gallon garbage bags, put a few items in one, then use a vacume to draw all the air out. Now tape, or better yet seal the bag with some sort of thermal seal.

One of the few sets that some people may find worthwhile to own are the camping kit sets. Put a shirt in it, close it, roll the bag up to squeeze out the air, then unroll the bag to get it flat again for packing. It makes a workable way of keeping clothing dry if you go camping and are prone to falling into creeks or rivers, or dropping your backpack or other carry bag that way. Again you will want to watch out for overpacking, as the zip lock seals may very well come appart on you.

That's just my opinion though. Others may note other opinions.

-Rusty

Lift the Bed, and constructive shelves

[haplo21112]

Seeing that your married I am going to assume that you and yours have a queen size bed? A full at least? Anyway the foot print of the bed is a huge amount of unused and potentially un discovered space.

1. Lift the Bed on blocks as high as you dare go with it. My wife and I have two queens in our house One of which is an antique cast iron frame. That bed as a good 1.5 feet of clearance under it Alot of stuff fits in that space. (or at least when we had a 1200sft house it did, with nearly 4500sft including the garage and basement now under bed storage space isn't nearly so as important.) The other bed was once upon a time before I meet my wife the one I had in my 1000sft house, at one point I had a 2.5 foot lift goinf with that one practically needed a ladder to get into it. LOTs of storage space there.

2. Use all the typically wasted space. Get those wire (usually closet) shelf setups from Lowes run the around the top of the walls in whatever rooms you can stand them. They have a width thats perfect for CD's/DVD's/VHS (hint laying a strip of cardboard on then putting the objects on works best.) If you have the space do more than one row. That gets the media out of the way.

Re:Variable gravity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately that isn't quite technically true. I know I'm being a pendantic engineer but osmosis is specifically diffusion through a barrier in an aqueous medium. I don't remember the correct term for the general case when water isn't involved.

Magazine

[The-Bus]

This sounds a bit anti-slashdot but I had/have the same problem and just went to the hardware store and got myself a magazine just about organizing. There were a TON of really good ideas there and I've picked up (and used) some ideas over the past couple of years. Here's a small list, hopefully someone will still read this one:

• If you haven't used something in year, throw it out. If you think it's not garbage-worthy, give it to a friend or family member who might really like it. That was you can re-visit that poster/lamp/book when you see your friends.
  
• Think unconventionally. My living room I've turned into my office (desk for work, couches for longer conference calls or meetings). I don't have a dining room and my kitchenette has one chair in there for reading. When we eat, we out in the deck, the basement/home theater room, or on the kitchen counters.
  
• Give your clothes away. Any shorts or shirts you didn't wear this summer you should be giving away. In April, give away sweaters you didn't wear in the winter. Another test is to not do laundry as long as possible until you run out of clothes you want to wear. Once all the clothes you want to wear are dirty, clean those and give away all the others. (Exceptions for suits/formalwear/bathing suits etc).
  
• Get furniture that closes. Messes look a lot worse when they are inside furniture. You may think you're cramped but it's only because you have stuff stacked everywhere that could fit somewhere else.
  
• Media. While I don't feel like ripping DVDs, I rip every single one of my CDs. The discs I keep in easily reachable binders, the cases are all in boxes in storage in the furthest corner of the basement.
  
• Lend temporarily. Moving cross-country for a year or two? Leave bulky furniture with family or friends and come back it for later once you have a bigger place or once you move back.
  
• A lot of people mentioned wire shelves on the top of walls. I'll do you one better. While this isn't the most cost-effective way, it may look the coolest. Install wooden shelves with a flat bottom about 12-18" from the top of your ceiling. Do this along one side of the wall, or along three walls. Make sure they are seamless from end to end. You can always put in crown molding below the shelf so it looks more liek the home's architecture. I've seen these done and you can house hundreds and hundreds of books along space that is NEVER used. A few I've seen with recessed-/indirect-lighting.
  
• Resist buying lots of things. That's especially tough for me because if I see something cool for cheap I have to get it. What do, however, is give it to someone else who needs it.
  

As cheesy and ungeeky as it sounds, take a look at some home organizing magazines or walk around IKEA or Linens and Things or Bed Bath and Beyond or The Container Store, and you'll get ideas. There's no one list of things that can be done because everyone's space and everyone's stuff is different.

Re:Variable gravity.

[moonbender]

Atomic diffusion, apparently.

Re:Priorities... From the original poster.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I run a small tech company. That is why I have 10 400gb hard drives laying around. We buy them 50 at a time to get a better rate. We'll buy 50 when we have a need for 20, then sell off another 20-30 at a profit. I kept 10 around and broke even this time.

I'm upgrading my lifestyle in several ways:

1. We are trying to get rid of our material posessions that we don't use, and be less wasteful.
2. We are moving to a far nicer and safer neighborhood
3. We are moving to a quieter apartment, so that we can get more work done.

The above poster definitely had one right idea, cost. We were lucky to have an 1800 square foot apartment in San Francisco.. Attached to that 1800 square foot apartment was a very loud and violent bar on one side, a very loud and busy art bar on the other side, and a neighborhood which has been deteriorating. The reality is in san franciso, $2000 a month either gets you a huge space in the ghetto, or a nice closet in a good neighborhood. We ended up settling on $2000/month for a 975 square foot apartment in a nice neighborhood (with a parking spot, which means we're spending $50 more per month for 925 sq ft less.. It also means I don't worry about my wife walking home alone)

And the table has sentimental value, yes, but also functional value. As we are a company with no real offices, that table is where all of our employees and founders get together twice a week for dinner to keep everything going.. We like to entertain.

Oddly enough, the space issue has not been too much of a problem. The table fits into our 20' x 20' "living room" just fine. with quite a bit of room around it.. It's the same room as our kitchen as well. Here are some of things we did :

1. Tossed our huge L-shaped desks. I now have a laptop cart. My wife has a small desk in the second bedroom (office)
2. Gave away the 15 old dual p3 workstations we had as our testing lab. Replaced them with 10 1U servers from Dell which we purchased over the summer, and decided not to use due to poor hardware design. They make EXCELLENT lab machines, and take up a tiny fraction of the room
3. Purchased a 30" Apple LCD, mounted it on our bedroom wall gave away our television.
4. Hung up a rack above the console in our kitchen, hung all of our pots & pans there.
5. Got rid of our livingroom furniture (We no longer have a livingroom, and would rather guests came to eat and talk in our diningroom, rather than watch movies and be anti social)
6. Put our table and benches on felt-covered plastic disks, and pushed it into a corner. We can pull it out when we have more than 4 people eating, and put it out of the way afterwards for more space.
7. Disabled all water in the 3rd bathroom (San francisco apartments are usually built expecting roommates to rent, not families), turned it into an extra storage area.
8. Freecycle and Craigslist! Got rid of all of our CRT monitors, replaced them with 19" LCD monitors.. Much nicer. Got rid of the massive pile of old hardware we didn't use (drawers full of hard drives, old scsi raid controllers, modems, memory, processors, motherboards, etc... Crap basically). That was hard, but logical. If it's not sentimental and you haven't used it in 2 years, you're not going to use it in 3.

9. Sold off my 80 oreilly books. My safari account is much more useful, I can search it. I rarely open up a tech book just to read it.. When I do, it's never an oreilly book. Oreilly books are for reference, not reading. The only tech books I've kept are those with historic value like unix books from the '70s, and a complete set of VMS manuals from the early '80s.

It seems like we have almost as much space in this 1800 sq ft apartment.. Also, there hasn't been an arguement, fistfight, or stabbing outside of our window yet this month.

We're still looking for a good solution for the 400+ dvd collection, CD collection, etc.. Hardware wise, I just found out that a closet on our first floor has multimode fibre in it. We're going to use that for video into our amplifier in our bedroom (once we figure out how to get it terminated).