Travel Pete's Journal: Basements, Kids & Mental Health

Summer Projects: New Pantry

It's time to start a new series on home improvement, seeing as how my list for 2004 has grown considerably. From painting and redecorating rooms (we recently tackled the master bedroom) to putting up replacement blinds, from painting the fence and house to nourishing our budding landscaping, from a new 1000 bottle wine cellar to remodeling the basement patio, from, well, you get the idea, it'll be a busy year!

My first project after we reorganized the master bedroom was a quick weekend deal.

Basically, we stored coats, hats and winter junk in this double sliding-door closet. It's not very deep (22"), but it's wide, and just off the kitchen.

When I was out of town, my wife Kathy cleared the closet and redistributed what turns out to have been just a lot of crap to other parts of the house. Much of it apparently made it to the Goodwill and Garage Sale piles as I haven't seen some of it since.

After a lot of internal debate about how complicated to get, I finally decided to slap on a coat of paint (color: Cornerstone, kind of a sublime wheat color), build 3 extra shelves across the entire space to complement the existing one, and call it a day.

A few days later, and a couple of holes through walls to allow the FoodSaver (see my earlier post on the FoodSaver, yummm!) to have power, and it was finished.

I used fiberboard with a laminate faux-wood surface to ease even that bit of possible polyurethaning. The toughest part was simply dealing with non-straight walls, but caulk took care of that.

Here's the order of construction:

Buy:
$22: Paint, 1 gallon, Behr Satin finish, Cornerstone
$30: 3 laminate-covered fiberboards (cut: 2 59"x16", 1 59"x12")
$5: MDF 1"x3" board, about 22 feet for this project
$4: Screws, #8 x 2" and #6 (thinner) x 1.5"
$4: Colored Caulk (I used a tan caulk that looks really nice and blends in great with the wood-laminate look and the wheat-colored paint.
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Total Cost: $65 plus labor and tools I already had.

Tools used:
a. Handheld cordless circular saw for final cuts (and safety goggles)
b. handheld cordless 18v drill
c. level
d. pencil
e. painting supplies
f. small workbench for holding wood as I cut
g. studfinder (buy a good one. I didn't, and when I got a good one as a gift, I suddenly appreciated it)

How-to: (At least, how I DID!)
1. Remove closet contents, remove garment hanging pole and doors.

2. Find studs for sturdy screw placement, measure how many shelves (I went for 4) and where they would be spaced (I wanted one at waist-height as a work surface for vacuum-sealing foods). Check for studs first. As I discovered, some of the side MDF boards were too short to reach a stud, so I had to re-cut more that were a bit longer than the shelf to reach the security of the stud.

3. Cut MDF board, which will act as the platform rail (back and sides) the shelves will sit on. So, for each 16" shelf, it was 2 14.5" side sections (which I cut a triangle off the front edges to make it look slightly sleeker) and a 59" section.

4. Place MDF evenly, use a level and pencil to get this one realllly right. Mark spots for where screws should go into studs. Screw it in with the #8 x 2" screws.

5. Paint everything.

6. Measure and final-cut your shelves, then pre-drill small holes in each shelf where screws will go through the shelves and into the MDF to hold the shelves down tightly to the MDF rail.

7. Add boards, screw down to MDF.

8. Caulk all around the top edge for a nice, seemless surface, using caulk to also cover where shelf and wall don't quite meet perfectly.

Smile, you're done.

9. Crap, no you aren't. Drill 1" hole through side wall to feed FoodSaver plug through to power outlet just the other side of the wall.

10. Reattach one sliding door.

Now smile, you're really... wait... yes, you're done!

A few pictures on the transformation are here.

Posted by BilFish at March 19, 2004 09:31 AM