The Ladder Approach to Vertical Storage

Living in a round building with less than 700 square feet of living space is challenge enough, but it's time to rise above our floor space issues.

With cooler weather and increased energy, coupled with the impending doom that winter always threatens, Keith and I are pushing hard on Poor Farm Projects. He's been busy on our chicken coop, which I'll blog about in my next post, while I have been struggling to find creative ways to get more essentials out of storage in the decrepit house, and into this micro-home of ours.

Yesterday, I attacked a century old ladder, cutting it down to size. Seven foot size.

The ladder was purchased at a friends farm auction over a decade ago, and too rickety for its original use, Keith did not balk when I asked if I could hack away at it. A couple passes with my circular saw and I had a workable section which I planned to convert to a blanket rack for our bedroom.

The ladder was imperfect of course, a couple rungs had bent slightly over the years (I can relate, "Bent Rung" was my Indian name those years I lived in SD) and there were old paint stains, nicks and splintered areas.

Not to mention some old dried bird dung. It was a farm ladder after all.

I scraped off the majority of dirt and debris with a stiff wire brush and then hauled out more of the ten year old, combo stain-polyurethane product I used on our window trim last week. The ladder wood was super dry and soaked up the stain as fast as I could apply it.

I especially appreciated the hardware still attached to the ladder so coated it as well, since it was now purely decorative and would never be put to use to secure the other ladder section I amputated. Just to be sure it dried well, I left the ladder outside overnight and then brought it inside this morning.



It fits perfectly in the oddly shaped corner formed by our closet and the round wall of our upstairs bedroom.



Tomorrow I'll wire the ladder to the studs in the wall so we don't have any late night crashing of ladder onto floor or our bed.

It feels good to be getting more of the finish work done inside, bit by bit by bit and to be moving so many of  our floor space hogging items, up and up and up.