Stacking deep, selling cheap at Leopoldi Hardware

Our small space solutions gallery has some pretty good ideas for stretching your square footage, but I must admit, we've got nothing on Joe Leopoldi.

His hardware store, on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn, is an 18x50-foot space filled with about 4,500 items for sale. There are literally five pieces of hardware per square foot.

How is that possible?

To look at the store, you'd understand: Watering cans on shower rods hang from the ceiling, boxes piled high hold dusty dehumidifiers and discontinued drills, and the cash register itself sits on a shelf as if it's for sale.

In front of it, a stack of joint compound buckets serves as a desk, where customers sign credit card receipts and scribble out addresses for delivery. Garbage cans and ladders spill out onto the sidewalk, and the furnace filters I bought, at right, had to be retrieved from a room upstairs.

Joe, who has been working at the store since 1966, when he was 6, put the filter situation bluntly:

"I got the regular ones that cost 2 dollars, and I got the fancy anti-microbial ones that cost 10. Honestly, the fancy ones don't work five times better."

I got two of the regular ones—first, because I'm cheap, and second, because that's one less item Joe has to find a way to fit into his store.

Note: To those of you that helped me decide what color I should stain my floor, that's the final verdict beneath the filter.