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Bathroom Shelves
Posted by: Adam Fuson @ 2006.07.06.1703
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I have been looking around the house for months building a list of improvements for when spring quarter would end, and I would have time to do some work. Concurrently, my sister recently moved out of the house and needed a substantial amount of furniture to populate her new house, and my mom was using a cheap and clumsy shelf in her master bathroom. The shelf was 30-inches long in a 48-inch opening, and constructed of Walmart style particle board. So about 2 weeks ago I cleaned out the master bathroom and started finishing the walls. I removed old wallpaper, sanded imperfections and painted the walls. Then I took several hours to measure and mark the positions of the new shelves. Unfortunately, I did not trust the level in the garage, so I used a plumb-bob instead. After tracing the line of the plumb-bob to create lines perpendicular to ground, I defined right angles with a set of calipers and a 3-4-5 right triangle. In this way I then created lines parallel to ground, which defined the placement of the shelves. I am confident this was a much more accurate way to build level shelves.
Once all the measurements were made and the lines drawn, positioning the small boards which would support the shelves went much more quickly. Of course, measuring a few more pieces of wood would take some added time, but I made certain to be within 1 mm, and that seemed to help everything fit together much better in the end. Fortunately, the walls of the bathroom were fairly square. Otherwise, my precision may have been wasted. After installing 1/2x1 inch boards to support the shelves and cutting the shelf surfaces from mighty white (known as mellamine by Home Depot or great Arian board by the Bull), I then fixed a 1x4 inch piece of the finest pine Home Depot offers to the front edge of the mighty white with 5 dowels for each shelf. I had ripped the 1x4 inch pine to 1x2.5 inches, but the extra height added a considerable amount of stiffness to each of the shelves. Finally, mom offered to paint the shelves, which was the only remaining step in their completion.
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