Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

Katie and I have been building pantry shelves at Matthew’s house this week. A few weeks ago Matthew removed the old wire shelves leaving his kitchen pantry naked. About a week ago I filled in the hundreds of holes left by those old shelves. Last weekend we purchased the wood for the shelving at his nearby Home Depot. We purchased two 4×8 sheets of 3/4″ MDF for the shelves (very heavy), and about a dozen 1×2 for the supports. The people at Home Depot used their fancy linear saw to cut the sheets into six 16″ strips that are 8′ long. Five of them are to be the primary shelves and one of the strips we further cut into four 4″ strips for can shelves. This week Katie and I decided to work together while Matthew was at work and build him new shelves. We’ve had a good time working together on this project. On Monday we taped and painted the pantry white. We also carefully measured and layed-out where each shelf would go. On Wednesday we cut and mounted the 1×2 supports onto the walls. This consists of five primary shelves including a can shelf on the left-hand wall, and four separate intermediate can shelves also on the left-hand wall. We also cut and fitted the shelves for mounting. On Thursday we predrilled and counter-shunk the shelves in preparation for mounting (over one hundred holes). Then we mounted the shelves and caulked around them. For mounting we screwed the shelves into the 1×2 supports and we also screwed the shelves into each other. The caulking took hours because we had to caulk every edge top and bottom and every hole smoothing them all by hand. Our next job is to paint all the new shelving white and to touch up the walls.

Putting up 1×2 supports on Wednesday.We’ve been spending about five hours each day doing this work, and we probably have five more hours of painting. Somehow I don’t think Matthew knew how much work this was when he tore out the old wire shelves. Oh, and have I mentioned that he took out the shelving in the master bedroom closet too. But that’s another project. So right now we’re his sweat-equity home improvement “elves”. We appear after he leaves for work, make a mess, clean up and disappear before he gets home.

Update: See Katie’s “This is what I have been up to since I been home” blog entry about painting the pantry shelves.