One of the advantages of having a business outside the home is the space available for inventory. When the business is at home, you have to get a lot more creative. Carrying an inventory at home, either for direct or online sales, can get cumbersome and hard to keep organized.
One of the ways I found to organize inventory at home is to move most of it to the garage. This will work with some types of inventory, and in this case it was books. Sturdy shelving is available at retailers such as Sam’s and Costco for very reasonable prices. The shelving I ended up buying was bought at Sam’s for under $80 per unit. These have a weight limit of 250 pounds per shelf. That sounds excessive, but with books or other heavy items it is possible to get close to that limit.
When I took this picture, the shelving units had been assembled and I was in the process of getting the inventory onto the shelves. In the background, there is a row of shelves full of inventory, and in the foreground there are empty shelves. The boxes are items that had not yet been listed and catalogued. This system relied on getting the most out of every inch of space possible. The shelves were quite tall, utilizing vertical space that was much more available than horizontal space.
For items of a more perishable nature, such as clothing, I store them in the house in rubber bins to keep them from being damaged. Other items are stored in the garage in the metal shelving rows. The only problem has been with keeping moisture from the items in the garage. A dehumidifier was set up in the garage with a hose draining the water to the outside to prevent any mold or musty odors from forming. This system has also been helpful at keeping our personal items in the garage from being damaged by moisture.
