I love my music room. After teaching on a cart, a portable, a cafeteria, and a regular sized classroom, I hit the jackpot. My music room is enormous and the shape of a grand piano. (I kid you not.) But as large and as lovely as it is, a huge curved wall doesn’t lend itself to a lot of usable storage space.
What I do have are deep cabinets with closet doors go to the floor. The first thing I did was ask my custodian to cut the doors in half, leaving only the top half of the doors on the closet. That allowed me to slide the Orff instruments in and out easily. It also allowed me to get more than two instruments in each closet.
I loved my new closets, but I had a ton of dead space inside. I also had 30 new ukuleles that needed storage. I wanted a way to utilize the dead space in the closets for the ukuleles. That’s where the Rubbermaid FastTrack System came in. I bought the system because of it’s flexibility. It could be customized it to fit my space perfectly. I bought the largest rail I could find and had it cut so that I could use the two sections in two different closets. The rail comes in two parts – a metal piece that installs to wall, then the black plastic cover (seen in the photo).
My only concern with the hook was that I didn’t want the ukuleles to hang from the pegs, for fear they would get damaged. To allow the ukuleles to hang from the neck, I added 1/2 inch pipe insulation on each side of the hook. This allows the ukuleles to fit snug around the neck.
This is the finished product! It’s the perfect storage solution for my room! I love that I can open the closet doors and hand out the ukuleles to my upper elementary students. Even better, when we’re all done, I simply shut the closet doors and the ukuleles are hidden away!
What creative solutions have you come up with for storing your classroom ukuleles? Share your ideas in the comments!
Are you teaching ukulele at your school? You might be interested in checking out my ukulele program for elementary students, called Sing & Strum. You can check it out here.
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I love this idea and how it can accommodate the xylophone carts too. Do you know the brand on the cabinet that was used? It seems fairly unique to have a cabinet without a bottom piece across the front. Most cabinets I have seen you could not roll a cart into because of a front edge.
What a fun idea! Much more fun than just stowing them away in some self storage units Omaha or something, that's for sure.