So, a while ago I told you about the mighty crash we heard one evening, only to discover the shelves in our closet had collapsed.
Since then I’ve gotten all the clothes and things that were in the closet out of the closet. That was the first step.
I’ve made multiple trips to the hardware store to get replacement parts. This is about where my usefulness to the project came to an end.
I made attempts to unscrew the mounting hardware from the wall and remove the shelves. I did get one shelf down, only putting a tiny hole in the side wall when the danged thing got away from me and I gouged the sheetrock. The rest of the screws wouldn’t budge. I got my electric drill out and found a bit that would fit the screw heads. Even then, I couldn’t get the dang things to move. I stripped a few of them. At that point I gave up and waited until my friend was able to come over to help.
He had this morning free so he made his way over. He’s been a professional carpenter for decades and has built houses so I trust he knows what he is doing.
He proceeded to get the rest of the hardware off the wall. He wrangled the few screws I had stripped out as well.
He got the first shelf up again. He discovered something along the way. The support rods I bought were longer than the original rods used to old the self up. They worked perfectly fine and reached the front shelf edge. The older rods could be reused to add more support to the middle of the shelf. This made the overall structure of the shelf sturdier. Originally the plan was to use steel cable to loop through the shelves, then anchor it into a stud in the ceiling. This would help support the heavy load, but it became unnecessary after reusing the older support rods.
He got the other shelves up too. I basically stood around, holding screws and tools, picking up things he dropped, and helping unbend the shelves and original support rods. To paraphrase a very old commercial for a food preparation product “We put up shelves and I helped!”
It was a few hours work. We took him out for lunch as payment. There was a Little Free Library across the street from the restaurant. Much fun was had.
Now comes the fun of hanging up all he clothes again. I’ve already reclaimed my foot of shelf space. Hopefully the wife will not put all of her clothes back and will let some of them go. I trust that the shelves are sturdier and could take the load, I just don’t want to test that theory.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum