ToasterWaffles

When we moved in we just threw boxes into the garage. That works for a while, but it doesn’t scale very well. So today I built some shelves, from scratch. I went down to Home Depot and bought some lumber and screws and headed back home. Having the mitre saw from the tank stand project came in handy. We already had a corded drill from a previous project as well. Those two tools would cost a pretty penny if you had to buy them together.

The first step of this project was to visit Home Depot to get the materials. To be honest, I didn’t find everything in one trip — it took about 3. If I’d planned a little more ahead of time, it would have worked out better. Since I don’t have a table saw or a circular saw, I had the guys at Home Depot cut the plywood for me. I made it easy on myself by deciding that 4 ft. wide by 18 in. deep shelves would be great. That meant they just had to make 5 18“ cuts and I’d be all set. Plus, the sheet wouldn’t fit in the car.

Once I got everything home I got to work cutting the 2×2 and 2×3 into the appropriate lengths. Each 2×3 was cut to 6ft. in length. Since boards come in standard 8 ft. lengths, and my shelves are 4 ft. wide, I could just cut the 2×2’s in half to get front & rear supports. Once everything was cut to size I put away the saw, got out the drill, and realized I needed shorter (2 in.) screws. The box I had was 3 in. — we’ll use those later. Screwing the shelves onto the supports is pretty simple: one on each end (not in the corner!) and one in the middle. Repeat on the other side, and you’re done.

Once that was done we laid down the 2×3’s and screwed in (time for those 3 in. screws!) the top and bottom shelves. Now that the two supports (back or front, whatever) are in we screwed in the rest of the shelves. Once that was all ready, we flipped it over and repeated with the other 2×3’s. At this point we stood it up to see how sturdy it was … or in this case, wasn’t. All the shelves tried to rotate about their one screw independently and made everything very unstable. The problem here is that I used 2×2’s for the front supports. That meant there was only room for 1 screw between the vertical and horizontal supports. One screw means they can pivot freely. Crap. The better way to have done this would have been to use 2×3 for the supports so that two screws could be used. Luckily we still had 4 x 2 ft. of 2×3. I quickly cut them down to 18 in. lengths and put supports on two of the shelves. That really stabilized the whole unit.

At that point Jess abandoned me. I got the pile o’ junk out of the way, put the shelving unit in place, and put all the boxes back on it. Everything looks much nicer now! To recap: shelves are very easy to build. This recipe isn’t quite as inexpensive as those plastic units you can get at your local home improvement store, but they’re much stronger and they’re custom fit. Plus it’s fun to build stuff! The total cost in materials came out to $47.15. Had I been smart and used 2×3’s instead of 2×2’s it would have cost $2.42 less and I wouldn’t need those dopey looking supports. Oh well, live and learn — I’ll get it right next time!