Weekend Shelving Project

Thursday evening Adam decided he hated the front utility closet and it had to be changed. So Friday after work he stopped at Menards to use their closet design station to see what our options were. He was cleaning the closet out when I got home from work. We went out to dinner and stopped back at Menards afterwards. We picked up all the hardware and equipment and went home.

I can't find a "before" picture anywhere so you'll just have to imagine it...

We moved all the stuff that had accumulated in the closet to the office and Adam went to work removing the wood that had held the previous shelf up. He managed to punch a hole (or two) in the drywall with the hammer (and pry bar) in the process. Oops. So this necessitated a patch and paint. Nothing is ever as easy as it should be around here. Pretty much everything we've taken on so far has led to the discovery of a half-assed quick fix sometime in the past by the previous owner. So frustrating.

Anywho, so Adam patched the holes and we left it to dry overnight. We woke up Saturday morning and Adam painted the closet so it could dry while we did our normal errands. We stuck a fan in there while we were gone to help it along since we had to close the door so the cats didn't get all up into the wet paint. It was pretty much dry when we got back. So Adam set about measuring and marking for the top support thing. There was some...irregularity... with the stud finder so he decided to skip that and just use drywall anchors. Except the anchors he had were too small for the screws needed to fasten the tracks to the wall. So he made a trip back to Menards to get bigger ones.

When he returned he put the bigger anchors in and found they weren't going to work out either. And we ended up with another hole or two in the wall that had to be patched. And painted. So, after determining where the studs were (very scientfically - by tapping on the wall and then drilling where he thought they might be) we ended up moving the whole thing over a few inches so the tracks could be screwed into studs.

*sigh*

Once that was all worked out it went pretty quickly to get everything up and affixed.



Adam put his tools away and I put everything back into the closet.



We even got hooks for the broom and mops.



And we got these LED lights so we can see into the closet at night. They're definitely bright enough!



Of course, we couldn't have done it all without JC's help.





We've got carpet cleaners coming in a few weeks so now we need to get our act together and start cleaning up the other two closets. And the bookshelf. And the computer desk. *sigh*