Create a functional drop station from a 3 tiered organizer that you can find at any big box store. No more dumping your stuff in a pile when you walk in the door.
When I come home, I like to practice the art of seeing how many things I can carry inside the house in one trip. On a normal workday, it usually consists of my purse, laptop, phone, lunch bag, keys… maybe a gallon of milk or some groceries, sometimes my jacket, my water bottle, oh and don’t forget the mail from the mailbox!
I blame this habit of overloading on living in apartments for so many years. It always seemed like finding an open parking spot near your unit was like winning the lottery (in other words, it never happened). So to avoid multiple treks to my car I loaded up as much as I could possibly carry in the hopes that I only had to make one trip, or at the most, two.
Plus, I live it in Oregon, and it rains…a lot. And I don’t like to go out in the rain. So I got pretty good at seeing how much I could carry to the house in one load.
Needless to say, when I walk through the door, I usually have a ton of stuff that’s about to spill everywhere and no great place to unload it all.
I knew I needed a drop station or drop zone of some kind but not wanting to spend a lot of money on something, I decided to scout the house to see what I could repurpose. In the girls’ room, I remembered that I had a 3-tier storage cube hiding in their closet. This was something I had tucked in there to add some organization but we are planning on adding built-ins to their closet so they didn’t “really” need it anymore. Lucky me!
After a trip to the local hardware store, I decided I would flip the 3-tiered organizer horizontally and add legs to it. This would allow me to raise it up a bit so that I could easily vacuum underneath it. Here’s what I grabbed while I was at the hardware store:
- 4 Heavy Duty Top Plate (comes with screws)
- 4 Wooden Legs
For the top plates (the metal piece that the legs screw into) I opted for these heavy-duty ones instead of the traditional square plates since that’s what my hardware store had in stock. But you could use either, it just depends on your project or what you can find. If you are making this yourself, double-check that the screws are not too long otherwise they’ll poke through the shelf of the organizer.
How to Assemble
The actual drop station was super simple to assemble. I placed the top plates on the bottom of the storage cube so that I could trace where the screws would go in. Then I pre-drilled the holes since I didn’t want to damage the bottom of the unit with the screws.
Once the top plates were in place, I screwed in the legs, tightened the screws, flipped the unit back over and voila!
I added some cute baskets to hold gloves and the dog leashes. Then I repurposed a planter I wasn’t using to hold mail and found a cute little votive jar to hold my keys. This drop station is the perfect place to drop my bag, put my shoes and unload anything else I come through the door with.
After using it for a few weeks, I might try and find some bigger baskets just to maximize my storage possibilities. What do you think I should go with? Metal baskets or maybe some nice woven ones to warm it up a little?
