Under the bed storage for Malm

This is a long overdue post because we've been using these under the bed storage boxes for a few months now. But they're great! Our current place feels just right for us, but at 400ish sf we definitely had to do a lot of downsizing and we still came up a little short on storage. We got more ruthless with our clothes, which means we can fit everything we own into one dresser and one closet. But because the bedroom is small we had to put the dresser in the closet, which meant there was absolutely nowhere for our shoes to go. Neither of us was quite ready to commit to living with two pairs each, so we went searching for other options.

We've had a low Malm bedframe for the last decade and it's served us well. It's survived three moves without any sign of distress. The only downside to the low bed is that you can't get storage containers to go under it. I prefer not to store stuff under the bed, honestly, so that's never been an issue. But when you're living in a small space, that real estate suddenly becomes very valuable.

If you get a higher framed Malm, you can actually get drawers that are made specifically for the bed and work perfectly with it. For a hot second (okay, fine, two days) we actually considered getting rid of our bed and buying a whole new one just so we could have the drawers. But all we really needed was space for our shoes and I knew we didn't need large drawers for that.

We looked for storage boxes that would work, but the clearance on the low Malm is just about 4 inches and we had a hard time finding anything decent.

Instead, Dustin built out some simple wooden boxes for us in just the right dimensions. Because they are sliding in and out on wood floors, we added strips of felt on the bottom edges so they'd glide easily.

{apologies for my incredibly non-inspirational shoe collection - shoes are 100% not my thing so I just wear them into the ground and then dread shopping for new ones}

They aren't tall enough for heels, but you can easily lay them sideways instead.

The next step is going to be adding a dust cover. I plan to just get some large pieces of felt, tack them down in the back and then weight down the front edge so it drapes nicely over the front of the box. This way we can easily pull the cover back to access the shoes but it will keep dust out. (Um, yeah. I still haven't done this but I'm happy to report that dust hasn't been a big issue)

I'm so happy with how these turned out and they're actually easier than our previous closet storage solution. Instead of leaving my shoes in a pile by the door I'm pretty good about putting them away as soon as I get home.