We added shelves to the little upper cabinet and this has been one of my favorite modifications to our Eurovan Camper. It’s been so helpful to have a little more storage! It is the little cabinet to the right, with the mirror on it, in the pic below. It’s such a weird shape, we never fully used all the space.

The van came with shelves in the closet, shown below, so to keep it matching I used a similar material in the cabinet.

This was the end product:

And here is how I did it! I have the pattern and measurements at the end.

Step 1) Buy some closet shelving at Lowes. You don’t need that much, so I found a bunch of cut off pieces underneath the display and asked if they’d sell them to me at discount – and they did, for $3! This is the piece I got for the lower shelf. If you want to do it just like I did, it has a bent edge, and from that to the next support bar is 6 inches.

Step 2) Cut it to the width you want the bottom shelf. I did 15 3/4 inch wide, maybe a little less depending on where the wire was. Then straighten the bend edge (my husband used a vice with two boards).

Step 3) Cut the rack so it’s 7 1/2 inches deep, max. For my piece that meant we cut along the second support bar from the top, as seen when comparing the pic above and below. For one piece my husband used the saw to cut it, for the other piece I think he just bent the pieces back and they broke.

Step 4) Cut the corners and bend the wire in to fit around the funny back corners in the cabinet. In the end my two pieces looked like this, below. I used two different closet racks so they came out different. The top one is for the bottom shelf, so it’s a little bigger, and the bottom one is for the top shelf, so it’s less deep, but they are both the same width, with similar clearance for the funny back corners.

Step 5) Super glue the loose wire pieces to each other, and super glue little pads to the edges where the wire was cut and is sharp enough to scratch the inside of the cabinet.

Step 6) Hang the shelves using itty bitty picture hangers. The walls were pretty hard so I had to mark where I wanted the nails to go and nail a little “starter hole” before I was able to nail the picture hanger nail in at an angle. This was by far the hardest part. The measurements for where I hung them are in the pattern at the end. This pic shows that awkward back corner well.

Step 7) Cover them with shelving paper, to reduce noise.

Step 8) Fill it up!

Here is the template I used for the shelf dimensions and placement. You can probably print the image so that the right corner comes out life size and you can use that to get the corner shape right for your shelf.

Alternately, if you want a simple fast solution, I recently found at Lowes this “Under Shelf Wire Basket 9.84 in x 13.58 in x 5.31 in” that, upside down, fits just about perfectly to add one shelf.

I hope that inspires you for your awkward cabinet!