May 2010

Building Shelves

I finally decided to bring some order to our storage room in the basement by building some shelves. First came the shelves to hold the multitude of comic books that I own.

Did the long one with the help of my dad, and mostly did the small ones by myself, which is a great accomplishment. See, I’m not what you call a handyman. I suck when trying to do projects alone. I’m great at following directions and helping, but building something from scratch solo? Not so much.

I attempted to do the second shelving by myself to see how much I could do. First I needed to prep the area. The people who built my house cut a few corners, one being a plank of pressed wood that just stuck out from under the stairs. Instead of cutting it they just left it there. Seeing how it was going to be in the way, it had to go before anything else could be done.

Next came finishing putting up the drywall and building and putting up a wall. Not only does it look nicer, but it also helps to have something to drill part of the shelves in. Surprisingly, that’s something I was able to do solo, for which I’m very proud of myself for.

I tried to do the second set of shelves solo and managed to get the first part done, but with the water pipes being at strange places (again, shoddy handywork by the builder, doing the cheapest thing possible), I had to enlist the help of my dad. Plus putting up the 2nd and 3rd levels required 2 people and with my wife being pregnant I needed another set of hands. It took us a while to figure out how to work around the piping but we finally did it. Below are a few pictures of the final outcome.

Luc "Sandman" G. May 2, 2010