The blogs are organized by date.
Comments will appear when we've had time to check them. Apology for the inconvenience, but it's a way to keep phishers and spammers off the page.
To make this task easier, she put an alcove next to the door. The alcove is large enough for a bench that you can sit on to remove clothes and outdoor footwear.
Needless to say, a bench is a flat surface and all flat surfaces promptly become clutter collectors.
Enter the cat who believes the world is his oyster. However, since he doesn't know what an oyster is, he treats it like a litter box.
Part of the clutter on the bench was the bags of kitty litter. Mark kind of gets points for using the litter, but since the litter was sealed in plastic bags at the time, he doesn't get a lot of points.
The alcove is about 51 inches wide. The bench is about 45 inches wide, and off-the-shelf storage shelves are 48 inches wide.
It would be nice to put a tall shelf in the alcove with the bench beneath it and all the potential targets six feet in the air.
This comes very close to just working, sort of.
Finding a storage rack that's about 8 feet tall and has no shelves for the first 5 or 6 feet (and isn't as ugly as sin) is a no-go. Even finding one that's ugly as sin didn't work.
However, Lowes has 8 foot long white laminated shelving boards and 48 inch white wire racks, and I've got a wood shop and my uncle has a barn where we can practice so lets put on a play! (oops, wrong movie.)
My idea was that I'd use the 8 foot long laminated shelves as supports for the 48 inch wire racks. The 48 inch racks would push the supports against the walls and everything would be rock solid.
Using the laminated shelves and the wire racks required pretty minimal work on my part, so I estimated an hour or so for the project once I got the pieces.
I swore I could hear Carol laughing at me.
First issue, the 8 foot shelving boards are 3/4 of an inch thick. That's 1 1/2 inches plus 48 inches, which is 1 1/2 inches less than the distance between the walls.
Easily solved. Just screw 1x4s to the outside of laminated shelf, and since a 1x4 is actually 3/4 inch thick, that expands the supports and racks to 51 inches. Enter reality. (Really, who likes reality.)
First thing I discovered was that the 8 foot laminates from Lowes are 11 1/2 inches wide, not 12 inches. The wire racks are exactly 12 inches wide. The mounting holes for the racks would sit in space 1/4 inch outside the laminate. There's not much support in open air.
Easily enough fixed. I rip-sawed an 8 foot 1x4 (actually 3/4 x 3 1/2) to 1 3/4" wide strips, I screwed the strips to the 1x4 I'd used to thicken the supports, expanding the 11 1/2 inches to 13 1/4 inches. Presto, there's now wood for the mounting holes.
The big issue is that in order to put the ends of the 48" racks into the support boards, the supports must be 48 inches apart. Once the wire racks are in position, the supports need to be 47 inches apart so there's 1/2 inch of rack in each hole.
Turns out you can't put a board both 47 inches apart and 48 inches apart at the same time. I think this was a real oversight when they designed this universe.
I finally ended up with the supports about 47 1/2 inches apart, and a lot of bending and swearing to get the racks inserted into the mounting holes. Then a few more profanities when the racks slipped out of the holes and tore gouges out of the laminate. Eventually, I got the mess to hold together long enough for me to install some wide-head screws to secure the racks to the supports.
That's when I discovered that wire racks are designed to be supported in the middle, not just the ends. When you put a 14 pound sack of kitty litter on a wire rack, the back edge sags.
More wooden supports and more screws, and the shelves won't collapse.
In the end, the nice, clean design I started with mutated into a functional kludge.
But, two days into the two hour task, the new rack gets clutter off the bench and actually looks OK if you don't look too closely.
Carol is probably still shaking her head.