Boxes for a garage shelving bay

Garage racks are usually 40 cm deep, which suits boxes up to about 39 cm deep: the whole Really Useful Box family from the 4 litre up to the 25 litre, the mid-sized Curver boxes, Wham’s long Crystal boxes, which are 39.5 cm wide and run along the shelf, and open-top Euro containers, whose 40 cm side is a flush fit on a 40 cm shelf. Because you want to read labels and pull one box without unloading the shelf, the layouts below are all a single row deep, and you will see mixed sizes where a big box plus a couple of smaller ones fills the shelf better than one size alone.

Things to think about:

• Weight. A 25 litre box full of tools is heavy. Keep the heavy boxes on the lower shelves and check your rack’s per-shelf rating.
• Move the shelf, not the box. If a layout leaves 60 mm of air above the stack, dropping the shelf above by one notch may let you add another tier.
• Clear boxes save time. Being able to see what is inside beats any labelling system.

The results below are for a 90 × 40 × 40 cm bay. Open it in the calculator to try a different shelf spacing.