One of our favorite things about reading the house tours that are featured here on Apartment Therapy are finding those simple, clever and ingenious ideas that homeowners come up with to improve their lives.
One of our favorite ingenious ideas we remember is from a tour we did in Austin, Greg and Laura's Space Maximizing Bungalow. Their whole house was beautiful and filled with great space-saving ideas, but there was something they did in the kitchen that won us over with its simplicity: they installed a simple, fold-down shelf for their cookbooks, created with a piece of wood and some hinges.
Over and over again we see that the best ideas are simple, functional and affordable, and so we ask you what your favorite ingenious idea has been, whether in your own home or something you’ve seen. It doesn't have to have cost a lot of money or even be that brilliant, but surely there's been something that you've either created or come across that has had significant life-bettering qualities. What are your favorite ingenious ideas?
More ingenious ideas from Apartment Therapy:
Look! Store Your Books in the Rafters
AT Europe: London Close-up - The Amazing Staircase
Andrew's Ingenious Floating Monitor Home Office
8 Ingenious Ideas We're Totally Stealing
Clever Storage Ideas
10 Design Ideas to Steal from the New IKEA Catalog
Veronica & Keith's Handmade Chic 
Before & After: A Bathroom Goes From Pinky Peach to Sleek and Chic
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Hunslet Dinner Plate
A Beginner's Guide to Superb Stir-Fry: Quick, Healthy Meals from a Wok
Easy Pitcher Cocktail Recipe: Strawberry Basil Margaritas
Comments (2)
We have a couple of akward spaces in our apartment. There is a 'desk' in the kitchen that is not usable so there is this large empty space under it. There is a similar space in our bathroom. The vanity stretches across the whole room but the cupboards only go halfway. By simply putting a tension rod with simple material across both spaces I have an extra pantry and a place to put dirty clothes with no one seeing the storage.
I built a wooden shelf in our small hallway sized only for paperbacks, not only height-wise, but depth-wise. I have a rather large library of books and it was a way to use an otherwise unusable space and save the other bookshelves for larger books.