Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project for the week. Let’s get started!
My bedroom closet is an interesting shape. One side is only deep enough for hangers, and the other fits my dresser with standing room left over. Over time, my dresser became the de-facto resting place of a couple boxes with soft articles stacked on top of that. A few weeks ago, I had a gravity crisis involving a towel and some winter bedding.
Taking a look at the rest of my closet, I noticed a bunch of unused space above my dresser. An additional shelf would fit the space nicely. The two existing shelves are of a simple enough construction: two brackets, a pinewood surface, a dowel for hangers, and some screws to hold everything together. A matching shelf for light-weight, long term storage shouldn’t be too difficult, and should work nicely if/when the house is sold.
Gathering Materials
A special thank you to my father for doing most of the actual work in building the shelf. I mostly did logistics tracking (strategic pestering) to have it done within the week. When I use the term “we,” it’s something he either did while I was either unavailable or ducking away from noise.
Our local hardware store is rigged for Pandemic Brand Pickup (not really a TM): order online, and your merchandise shows up in lockers outside. The brackets made it home this way, but the board had to be picked up manually. Online listed a board that would have been about the right size had our local branch carried it, so a longer one found its way home.
When we went to actually build the shelf on Sunday, we noticed the brackets’ brace pieces were round as opposed to the “flat” ones already in-place. We needed screws for going into the wall anyway, so it was back again to the hardware store.
Shelf Assembly
As much as I would have preferred a nice, symmetrical construction, the brackets must mount into studs. With my closet the seeming result of leftover space within our house’s structure, the stud finder’s lopsided report should not have been so great a surprise. The sides of the studs were marked with a pencil. A measuring tape pointed to how high to drill pilot holes so we didn’t start cracks in the wall while driving screws. Soon, the brackets were hung and secured.
The pinewood board wasn’t the prettiest to look at. Not only was there a knot running across the width on one side but the side we kept had a bunch of micro knots one might mistake for mold spots. The shelf is going in above my head, so I chose the better looking side to go face down – even though it had some lumber markings, a number printed onto it, and a bad cut line from before we discovered the store hadn’t cut the ends at a 90 degree angle. We sanded the markings off, and I continued sanding a little for slightly smoother surfaces. The board was secured with four tiny screws from our stockpile.
The hanger rod was sourced from our supplies – most probably it came out of a closet elsewhere in the house. We shortened it, but it had a large splinter we had to glue back into place and clamp it overnight. The morning of posting, I spent a while sanding it smooth and we installed it taking into account the nicest side to look at while hiding a previous screw hole and the repaired splinter.
Takeaway
The field of computing is complemented by additional skills. While this shelf might only ever support cloth, home improvement techniques can just as easily be used to cable manage a workstation, get your network goodies off the closet floor, or install a wall-mounted server.
Final Question
What supporting skills have you used for computing?