Some close friends of ours have a booming side business selling Legos and Lego sets. They have dedicated a room of their house for storing the Legos, but as most side hustles do, it’s starting to take over other parts of the house as well. They approached me about figuring out a way to streamline their storage. This will be an ongoing project that I will update as it goes (maybe continuing on on YouTube).
Currently, they have three of the 4×4 Ikea Kallax units, and countless other configurations of the same model line. This is perfect as we can come up with a repeatable solution that can be batched out without having to redesign every time. The issue they are encountering is wasted vertical space in each cubby.
The idea for the shelving and bins is for everything to be modular. If, in two months, they decide to switch up how they are sorting the Legos (this is a constantly evolving endeavor), they can simply remove the shelf or bins and place them elsewhere without worry of compatibility. The idea we came up with is to add sidewalls with dados (grooves) to accept sliding shelves. We also decided it would be beneficial to have additional bins for storage. Luckily, there is a system already developed for the bins that uses a standardized sizing, allowing for the bins and base grids to be completely modular. This system is called Gridfinity (designed by this madman- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra_9zU-mnl8&t=1002s).
Below you can see how the 1×1 bins will nestle together on one shelf (I say bins, but really think of them as units as there are many different sizes- we’ll cover that shortly). Each shelf can hold 7 bins left to right and 8 bins front to back, for a total of 56 bins per shelf. I was able to design the grooves in each cubby to accept 6 shelves per cubby, for a total of 336 bins (units) per cubby. That means for ONE 4×4 (16 cubbies) Ikea Kallax unit, we can have 5,376 bins/units! That’s an astounding amount of storage for such a small space. And more importantly, it’s efficient space. Almost every single square inch of this storage unit is useful.
The bins are designed in 42mm “units”. This makes them modular left and right and allows the ability to create different size bins for whatever you need. My only constraint for bin size is the size of my printer bed, which is 256mm x 256mm. This allows me to print 6 units in either direction. That allows this system to use any size bin between a 1×1 and 6×6.
As with anything, the design starts with taking very precise measurements of the Ikea Kallax units and designing them in CAD so I can play around with the setup and capacities. I was very surprised at how repeatable the measurements were throughout the different units I measured- they were all within half a millimeter. I guess with high level production like Ikea, this makes sense. Either way, it makes it much easier for me as I know that my final design will be useable on any future Kallax I build for. Luckily, they had a single Kallax unit I could use to build a prototype on.
This worked well enough but I wasn’t happy with the shelf supports. I screwed the shelf supports to the side of the Kallax, but as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s not much “meat” in the internal part of an Ikea cabinet to hold on to a screw. So, I kept the overall design the same, but instead of individual dividers, I elected to cut a dado (groove) into an entire sidewall that would accept the shelves. This way, I could make the sidewall to the exact vertical size of the opening and it would be installed with a friction fit. This is a much better solution as it’s removable if needed, and very stable especially once the drawers are installed.
