Staggering Perfection

It was perfect. I had defeated the urge to be normal, taken the doors off a cabinet, and found a way to fit more storage containers on every shelf. The containers fit snugly together, the edges of their lids barely kissing. The stacks of identical standardized containers were very pretty and neat. I felt organized and smart.

The storage containers stacked neatly onto the shelves with their lids just barely touching. It was pretty and perfect.

Then I tried taking one of the containers off a shelf, just one, and all the beautiful oragnization collapsed into a mess of random boxes.

That container caught against its neighbor and tried to pull all of the other containers along with it. I had to use my knee and hip to keep the entire stack of containers from being dragged onto the floor. When I finally managed to extricate the one container I needed, the rest of the containers were leaning together in a messy, randomly overlapped stack. Putting the container back into place was equally awkward.

Whenever I tried to move one of the boxes, especially one in the middle of the stack, then entire structure became a jumbled mass of interlocked puzzle pieces.

It was not perfect. In fact, the arrangement was so annoying it was almost useless. Getting anything from the containers was a slow and painful process. Sometimes a repetitive pattern looks really good but doesn't equal a good working design. I huffed and puffed in self-disgust for the rest of the day.

Then something clicked. When the containers were leaning with their lids overlapping, their angled sides didn't touch and the containers slid past each other without interference. If I could stagger the containers so that their lids alternated heights, the containers would be easy to remove and insert. 

I grabbed a piece of scrap MDF, put it at the bottom of one stack and tried the new arrangement. Now it was perfect, or at least way better than before. There was plenty of room to work with the containers without disturbing the adjacent container. And even if I pulled a container from the bottom of the stack, the remaining containers dropped easily to the next level down instead of collapsing into a jumble. 

When I added a spacer shim (shown in red at lower left) the boxes still stacked neatly but no longer touched or interlocked. The sloping sides of the containers allowed overlapping while still giving easy access so the containers could be removed and reinserted without disturbing their neighbors. 

I immediately started planning a trip to the local hundred-penny store to buy enough containers to make the entire cabinet one large collection of standardized units. Not everything fits well in that size of container, so I probably won't. I'll keep using cardboard boxes and old food containers until I find a better solution.

So while the idea of a perfect, equally spaced array of matching boxes is appealing, life is messy and awkward. The mismatched catch-as-catch-can collection of random containers is often more useful in reality. 

I need to remember that the next time I sit down to design something.

The containers are easy to remove and replace now that they are at slightly different heights. A piece of scrap MDF under the left stack was all that was needed to prevent the boxes sticking together and being dragged onto the floor whenever I tried to remove one.

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