Saturday Recap (June 6th) - The shevles you can sleep on

June 9, 2008

Posted in: Do It Yourself, House and Garden, Saturday Recap

Tags: attention, board, box, edge, everyone, garage, garden, level, maintenance, material, measure, particle, placement, process, project, runner, screw, shelf, spring, strength, summer, wall

With the rising price of everything these days, we decided we’d have one last project for the summer. Of course this is aside from any maintenance projects or garden projects that may need attention down the road.

It’s a set of shelves for the garage because, like everyone else in the world we have too much stuff, and not enough places to put it all.

So we decided on where we’d like the shelves to be, on the south wall against the back, and how long we wanted them - 12 feet x 2 feet.

We quickly drafted up a plan and got started on picking up material.

6 2×4’s

12 2×2’s

4 12×2 particle board sheets

1lb box 2 1/2 inch screws

1lb box 1 5/8 inch screws

This was a pretty easy process, once you know what to do. First you want to screw in you runners. Those were the 2×2’s. Since they’re only sold in 8ft pieces and we were running 12ft we needed 12 to make 8 rows of 12 feet. We measure up 2 feet from the floor at both ends and ran a line. Then we proceeded to screw in the runners. We kept doing that for the 4 rows.

Next we got the bottom shelf ready for placement. One the outside facing edge we screwed the other runner (pre-drill the particle board only) and then pre-drilled the other side to set it in the wall runners. We moved the shelf over and screwed it in along the back runner.

I know you’re asking yourself “what’s holding it up?”, the answer is my knees…lol. I held it up while another person set up one of the 2×4’s. The leveled it and pre-drilled it to set screws into the front edge runner. Once that was done we did 3 more (4 across the front). Realize you should only sink one screw in each 2×4 so you can check your trueness (up and down level) before sinking that last screw. Do this for the 2 bottom shelves then you should be true the rest of the way.

You can see here we’re at the third level, at this point my father in law thought we could strengthen our wall be screwing down some boards in the rafters, so as a test of strength I got up on it and it supported me just fine, there wasn’t even any spring to it.

It took us about 2 to 3 hours to do all this and they are tough. I can stand on them, my kids can sleep on them, and we should now have some place to organize the rest of our junk so we can fit a car in the garage too.

So what about the other 2 2×4’s? Well they’ll be for the end, kind of a cap for both sides. We just haven’t screwed them in yet.

Posted in Do It Yourself, House and Garden, Saturday Recap