Shelves to Devon

Our younger son and his wife have recently moved to South Hams in Devon to pursue their medical training, aiming to qualify as GPs in a couple of years' time.  On our first visit to their new house we identified an alcove which was asking quietly to be filled with book storage.  Obviously a job for some stock timber and tools back home, with the interesting question of how best to get it south.

The shelving timber came from my long-used Manchester timber-yard on the Subaru's roofbars.  Much clamping produced double-width pieces to form the lower storage section, fitted with mdf doors on hinges recycled from our old kitchen cabinets.  Suitably routed and glued together, the shelves entered the painting stage:

Just about this time, the weather changed and the temperature plummeted, leading to condensation forming on the underside of the barn roof and dripping onto the paintshop below.  Time to dig out a tarpaulin and rig a roof lining:

The next problem was transporting a highly flexible sheet of 6mm plywood for the backs of the units from Denbigh on a rainy day.  Sheet materials have a way of taking off from roofracks if you're not careful, so I took with me some battens and G clamps and bought a cheap sheet of hardboard as a rain cover.  It worked a treat:

I didn't fit the back to the upper shelf unit at this point as I needed the uprights to fit snugly around the head restraints on the front seats of the car - otherwise it would not have fitted in.  The lower storage unit went underneath it, with doors and loose shelves wrapped in copious amounts of cardboard.  Three hundred miles later, and with a little more construction time, here it was:

My customers were pleased, and I was glad to have the space back in the barn.  However, before I left it seemed a good idea to help to prune their pollarded willows, and with basket-making in mind I ended up bringing the Subaru back to North Wales wearing a dishevelled red wig (the car, not me):

So for now the willow is taking up the space in the barn which the shelves vacated.  More stock.  Sigh...