All businesses never have enough storage space, and even the most well intentioned office ends up with boxes on the floor, or on top of filing cabinets, which make the office  look untidy.

However with careful planning you can maximise your storage space with minimal cost. Proper planning combined with modern storage solutions can give you what you require .

You really need to speak to an office furniture dealer or visit a showroom to see what is available.  In the meantime the following may give you a better idea of what options are available :-

Filing Cabinets. These really should be avoided if you can, as  3 or 4 drawer cabinets are very inefficient in terms of storage space to floor space. The tallest units are still only about waist height as you need to access the files from the top.

The space between the cabinet top and the ceiling is wasted. The cabinets are typically 60cm deep, and the drawer opens out another 45 cm, and you have to stand at the end, which means you have to allocate 150 cm of depth to use a filing cabinet.

The 2 drawer units are sometimes used as close to desk filing, and a few of these units will actually fit under a desk.

Tall steel storage units. These can be as high a 220 cm and as wide as 160 cm if required. It just depends on the access space into your office. Some units are delivered flat-packed and assembled on site, which gets round the problem of access, but once built, they are never as solid as a factory welded unit.  These units will hold a multitude of items, and there is usually a full range of accessories available, to help you efficiently store everything from CDs to car parts.
Depending of your budget, you can have these cupboards supplied with a set of standard full height doors, a set of bi-fold doors, or the more usual tambour doors.

Each type of door is suited for a particular use, but the tambour is the most versatile in all situations. When open it slides away into the inside of the cupboard but can be easily closed for security and safety. The doors take up no external space when opened, and reduce the internal storage space by a very small amount.  This makes them especially suited for corridor storage areas. The tambours are usually fire resistant (when shut they prevent the contents of the tambour form adding to the intensity of the fire) which will keep your fire officer happy.

In most cases the steel shelves in these tambour storage units, are designed to take lateral filing as standard. Lateral filing cradles (very similar to suspension files, but with a reduced hanging centre width) hang from the underside of the shelves and your folder is pushed into the file, through the front edge, rather than down through the top edge, as with suspension files.

The result is that you can see all of the files and their relevant labels at once, and you can fit up to 6 rows of lateral filing in one unit, making these units very space efficient indeed. Furthermore, there is no need to buy anything more than a standard tambour cupboard and shelves. No screw on kits, no pullout filing frames, and most importantly, no danger of the cupboard becoming unstable due to the weight of the folders in it.

Cupboards with 3 or 4 pull out filing frames fitted should ideally be fixed to the wall, as they could topple forward, due to the  shift in centre of gravity caused when a telescopic filing frame is pulled out, laden with heavy folders. Anti tilt devices, designed to allow only one frame to be pulled out at a time, can fail, or be fitted incorrectly, with disastrous consequences.

Wooden cupboards with tambour doors offer the same advantages as a steel tambour unit but usually cost more.  In addition the shelves usually require an add on kit to allow lateral files to be fitted, and this again increases the cost.

So the next time you replan  your office layout, make sure you consider how tambour storage units could work for you