Adventures in DIY #2

To get decent access to the hot water cylinder plumbing last weekend, I had to pull out the shelving in the hot water cupboard. This gave me the opportunity I needed to upgrade the shelving. As it was, the shelves were only half the depth of the cupboard (< 300 mm), making them next to useless to actually store things on, and leaving a huge dead space between them and the doors. So this weekend I set about making better use of the available space. I dropped into Three Bros ITM in Glen Innes to see what was available, and they had a stack of 18 mm Melamine sheet seconds at half price ($40). Bargain! I quickly calculated that I could get all the shelves (just) from one 2400 x 1220 sheet, so I grabbed one along with some edge strip, and a sheet of 12 mm ply for the shelving in the garage.

The rest of the day was spent cutting, routing and test fitting the shelves. I cut a 75 mm strip off the front of the existing upright to support the front of the shelves, with the rest remaining where it was. This meant that there was less access to the HWC plumbing, but it’s a small price to pay for more than doubling the shelf space. And it can be relatively easily removed anyway. I also cut some strips from one of the old shelves to use as supports for the shelves and screwed them to the new front and rear uprights. It was a pretty tense time when I came to check that the new assembly actually fit in the space, but fit it did. Cutting the Melamine sheet was interesting, and a good learning experience. I used the circular saw, running the edge along a sheet of 3 mm MDF that Dad had given me. On the first cut, the saw ran under the edge of the MDF for a short distance before I noticed. Bugger. This was kind of annoying, as there was very little room for error. For the rest of the cutting, I used a piece of ply as a straight edge as it was much stiffer. The size of the sheets also meant that I couldn’t use the router on the edges of most of the shelves, otherwise I would lose precious shelf space. Thankfully I had the forethought to make sure that the front edge of each shelf was an outer edge of the sheet. Unhappily, the edges I did cut with the circular saw were pretty ragged where the melamine was chipped baldly. Next time I will cut the sheets with the melamine side down, and the blade set to just penetrate the sheet, reducing the angle the teeth make to the facing. Live and learn.

Anyway to cut a long story short, the shelves are in and look good. I still have to trim the edges, which I’ll do this week some time. Most pieces fit in nicely, except for the top shelf which was the full width and depth of the cupboard. What a mission to manoeuvre that thing in! Overall, I’m very happy with the result. And all for under $50!