This $9 Home Depot Find Is the Key to Doubling Your Kitchen Cabinet Shelf Space
When you’re trying to find smart, stylish storage solutions for your home, sometimes it can feel like the more useful the item, the higher the price point. All that’s to say that finding affordable ways to organize your home can be a struggle, but one Canadian small-space dweller has the hunt down pat. In fact, Tina Barisky found a solution for doubling her kitchen cabinet space for less than $10. After you see just how easy it is to install, you just might want to use one inside every cabinet or on every open shelf in your home.
Barisky lives in a 400-square-foot apartment in Vancouver with her fiancé, Rob. “At 400 square feet, it was much smaller than anywhere else I had lived before,” she says. “The bedroom is literally just a room for a bed, and the closet is only three feet wide.” Having to work around the limited square footage was a challenge Barisky gladly accepted, though, and now she actually offers professional space-planning services and shares her ideas with over 90,000 followers on TikTok.
“Our home is Japandi-inspired, minimalist, and unfussy,” Barisky says in her house tour. She and her fiancé love the warmth of wood and calming neutrals, so they’ve incorporated these design elements prominently throughout their home. In addition to sticking to light colors and only the essential furniture, Barisky is also very intentional about using sleek storage solutions to maximize space. “Like many who live in small spaces, we have had to get creative with the storage,” Barisky says, and some of the smartest solutions she has are hidden inside the kitchen cabinets. Specifically, Barisky hung a wire under-shelf basket in her cabinet to create a second shelf for her mugs that utilizes otherwise wasted vertical space.
When considering where to spend money for her home, Barisky definitely goes the more practical route, and this under-shelf basket is no exception to that rule. Although Barisky didn’t share where she found this gem, a ventilated wire shelf made out of metal like this can be found for less than $9 at The Home Depot — among other places — and one size should fit most cabinets. “We are very much about functionalism, so we keep the decorative elements to a minimum and focus where possible on how creative design can help us to gain space,” Barisky says.
Aside from the price point, the best thing about this basket is that it already comes fully assembled. You can also install it in less than five minutes with no tools. Designed to clip onto a shelf, all you have to do is slide it in place and make sure it’s sturdy enough to support anything from ceramic mugs to small bowls.
Ultimately, for Barisky, it’s all about paring down to what’s truly necessary and then finding storage space — out of thin air — for those need-to-have belongings. That’s where ingenious products like the under-shelf basket and others come in. “Making the space our own while managing to fit all of our belongings has been an incredible journey and an exercise in deciding what things we really actually need in order to find happiness,” Barisky says. “And I couldn’t be happier about our choice to live here.”
Buy: Home Basics Small Equinox Under Shelf Basket, $8.82