South Wales shelving

Our most recent trip to elder daughter's in South Wales was partly to help with the transporting to the abattoir of the three pigs which had had a very happy life in the pig ark described in my last post.  So the reward for the jobs which were done while I was there was half a pig, neatly butchered, to return to our freezer in North Wales.

The key job this time was to use shelving materials rescued from their former home near Oxford to make their new home feel like theirs - you can't have a home without books on shelves, can you?  As always, the problem with doing jobs like this miles from home is deciding on which tools and materials I need to take. This is part of the collection that went in the car this time:

(If you've spotted the rainwater pipe, that was for a different job!) We knew that we didn't have enough wooden shelving to complete the project this time, but the challenge was to get the uprights, the original brackets and some additional newly purchased brackets installed so that we could decide how much more timber to buy.

It's important with this kind of shelving system to get the uprights in exactly the right place on the wall.  They can be unforgiving, as the metal is pre-drilled and all the screwholes must be securely fastened, otherwise the strength of the shelving is compromised.  There's no room for botched drilling of the wall leading to out-of-line or wobbly wallplugs.

A tool I bought at a bargain price years ago came in very handy.  It's a laser level, and it was cheap because it came without a tripod support.  However, it exactly fits my camera tripod and when properly adjusted, casts a red laser-generated line on an exact horizontal level.  Here I'm demonstrating how it was used a while ago to line up the power sockets on a wall of our kitchen.

Fortunately, the marking, drilling, plugging and screwing went well.  It turned out to be a very good thing that I had included my small angle grinder in the toolkit, as the new brackets needed to be trimmed slightly to fit into the uprights, but soon we had the existing shelves in place - and then books!  I've measured up, and I'll be back soon with the additional timber.

As Anthony Powell wrote, Books do Furnish a Room.

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...