Wood storage shelves using SketchList 3D for the design.

Wood storage shelves solve many problems.

Wood storage shelves have been on Ed’s mind since he started milling his own lumber back in 2015.   He cut a large number of trees and wanted to turn them into lumber – rather than buying it from the lumber yard.

With the idea in mind, all he had to do was open Sketchlist 3D and define his initial parameters to start designing his DIY storage shelves. This is his story:

I worked up this plan for word storage shelves and thought I would share it.  If you have outside room and raw lumber for your projects then you might find this useful.  In 2015, I had about 4500 bd feet of lumber I had sawn into lumber from building my house.  I don’t have a lot of room for storage, and because I live in a cottage association, it would have to be stored under a roof.  And I need access to the different species: Red Oak, White Oak, White Pine, Maple, and Hemlock, etc.

The design of the storage shelves uses multiple assemblies so you can add and subtract different shelves and posts.  I designed it to be under a certain size (footprint) and on cinder blocks vs. in-ground posts as to not require a building permit for my area.  It can also be converted to a shed at a later date if not used for this purpose.

The roof is supposed to represent metal but as the SketchList trainers teach us, don’t take the time of creating materials and such when you know what they are.

Wood storage; The Reason and the design

The main motivation, aside from the fun of it, was to save money on all this wood by milling it myself.  Of course, the wood needs to dry and that requires some sort of wood storage shelves or rack.  So I designed this in Sketchlist3D.  The software gave me the cut list I needed.  I used it to sift through the salvaged wood and to know what was worth keeping.

All this to create racks to store my 4500 Board feet of project lumber we cut in 2015.  That’s my new shop in the background.

The lumber has been stored in this form since 2015 and is between 7-10% moisture.

The roof/canvas cover is made of slabs and has been weighing down the pile making it difficult to access.

The Build…

Here is the building of the wood storage shelves. As with any project I engineered changes as I went along in the build

So I transferred the wood over from the stickered pile to the dry side by size and type for building stuff.  Lots of stickers left for the next round.  Note – this link has great information about stickers.

Then I built a shed into part of it for cold storage and am starting to build the wood storage shelves for the new lumber that will be cut this fall.  We have 12 Red and White Oaks coming down around where the old white cottage was to build our new retirement home.  These will all be sawn into board feet and dried here.

Later I updated the wood storage rack design with the new loads taken into consideration.  I used 2x8s but they can be subbed out for 2x10s depending on your need.

New shelves were added into the assemblies so you can use then to clone or copy different lengths as you need them.

Pay attention to stickers and stacking

Note the Stickers screwed to the shelf should be a little higher than your loading device.  If you load/unload by hand, they can be a normal sticker.  I use my tractor to bring the piles into the shop and then return the pile to the rack.

Remember if you are storing wood outside, to leave as little space in the middle of the pile as possible.  Critters love to build nests in open cavities/spaces in the pile.  While it may not look as nice, try to put any extra space to the outside edge.  This design allows your leaf blower to blow each end of the pile to clean out any critter activity.

If you hand load/unload from the pile, this design also allows you to pull from the ends.

Building the racks for the new lumber to be dried.  This is salvaged from the 2x10s used to store the other lumber for the past 5 years and some of the old Cottage wood.

I did the Engineering loads on the original design and found it was not able to hold what I was going to put on it.  The design you see here can hold a dead load of green oak boards.

Ed Dedic

Shelby, MI, USA

Woodworking: Cabinets, Furniture, Frames, Driftwood Art,  and Furniture

Sketchlist3D Pro Mac Catalina

Thanks Ed.

BTW – readers might want to click and read this story about using SketchList 3D for, fence design, shed design and pergola design.