As an Amazon employee, I earn commission on affiliate links.

You probably know me and my love for cube shelves by now. We use these all over our house! They are an inexpensive way to store pretty much anything that can fit in a 12×12 inch space.

My husband has a cube shelf in his office closet, and he keeps random things in there. He realized that so much of it is wasted space. For example, he might have 5 catalogs stacked up that are only about 2-3 inches tall. The other 9-10 inches is wasted space!

He decided to build little shelves to install halfway up the cubes, basically adding another level within the cube. He is starting with two cubes. Let me show you what he did.

Here is what it looked like before:

We had leftover MDF boards from my daughter’s closet re-do that he used for this project. He cut two boards to measure 12×12 and sanded them until they were very smooth.

He was originally going to install these using cleats (look below to see what they were like) but decided on another plan. I’ll tell you more about that later.

Next, he painted everything white.

He decided to use metal peg shelf holders (like these) instead of the cleats. He drilled in holes the size of the metal pins and installed them.

Since these were MDF boards, the front edge shown was a little rough. We installed this edging tape (that you install by using an iron!) to make the front smooth.

Check it out now!

I love how there is so much less wasted space! He was able to free up two full cubes by creating these shelves.