Shelve it

Installing shelves in a home office needn’t cost the earth; it is a project you can quite easily do yourself. Clifford Roberts and Andries Eygelaar show you how.

Installing shelves in your home is an easy way of creating additional storage space. The high cost of hiring someone else to do this combined with the pressure under which many families are to save money these days makes it especially attractive if you can do the installation yourself.

Your first step is identifying the type of shelving you require and what weight it will carry – a shelf of books weighs far more than one carrying trinkets. In our case, we needed extra storage space in our home office. Our shelves needed to carry mostly books, papers and files of different sizes.

Our existing bookshelf was not working and we found ourselves surrounded by unsteady towers of books and paperwork. Not only did the office become difficult to dust and clean, but we soon also lost track of what was actually stored in the space.

Our plan of attack would not only solve our storage problem, but also allow us to thoroughly go through everything in the office and throw out that which was no longer required.

Removing the bookshelf and investing in a more efficient filing cabinet helped to open up a length of wall that would be ideal for two shelves 2.4m in length. At the local hardware store we purchased three lengths of SA pine, making sure the wood was relatively clear of knots.

Read the full article on page 46 of the August 2012 issue.