Kitchen project

Making a shelf in my kitchen

So, I will start by saying that I am NOT a builder/mechanic/whatever, I am not even that much of a handy man, however having 5 acres is teaching me what I need to know :) It can be a steep learning curve at times.

So, this is my attempt at making a shelf in the kitchen. One of the biggest problems that we have here is the lack of space, it could be due to moving into a smaller house, or the fact that I have lots of 'goodies', also could be refereed to as a 'resource pile', but it all comes in handy, especially for project around the house, like this one. 

Ok, so what did I make? This is it (to the left). just a set of three shelves attached to a wall. Sounds easy? Well, it was actually :) The shelves are made from recycled wood (not the kind that you pay $100 a meter for because someone said that they are recycled, I mean that they used to be an old fence and I collected it from town and have been using bits of it for many different things.

I will step you through what I used, how I did it and all that good stuff (for anyone who might want to do something similar at home)

So firstly I found the wood. This is one of the planks of wood from a fence, I removed the nails, I was going to sand it back and stain it, however since it was a first attempt I didn't want to get too excited by it :) Turns out that the wood is far to long for where it was going to be, so using a hand saw I cut the wood to fit (1/2 way so I got to use one piece for two shelves, double score!)

Then I attached some brackets, unfortunately these were not recycled, however where cheap from the local hardware store. I am building up my supplies of things like brackets from odd things that I find laying around the town, but it all takes time. (side note, this area does not have any form of hard-waste pickup / curbside pickup, so getting secondhand/scrap things does prove to be a challenge at times)

Once it was all measured against where I wanted to put the shelf, I drilled the brackets onto the shelf first (this was really important for the second and third shelves as the drill couldn't fit between the shelves to drill upwards, make sense?)










Then, once that shelf was in place, I measured up where to put the next shelf and ensured it was level, then continued making the top shelf (so all three in the end)

Nice and easy :) So the only tools I used in this was my drill, screwdriver, hand saw and spirit-level. The hand saw was used to cut the wood to the right length, the drill was for the holes into the shelves and into the wall, the screwdriver was to screw the screws through the brackets and into the wall and shelf, and the spirit-level was to ensure that my #Vegemite would not slide away! The parts used were two old wood planks (from a fence that was reclaimed) and brackets (with screws) from the local hardware store. So nice, so simple, but it adds so much storage into the kitchen for all the things that you need frequently :) I know that this plan and idea is really simple, and most people would think that you don't need a guide on how to make it, but it is more to start to show people that there are ways to recycle things, maybe ways that you don't think of right away (like an old fence into a shelf), that is what I am hoping to continue to do, find interesting ways of reusing things around the house (saves landfill). And always on a tight budget.

Thank you for checking this out, I will continue to update you all on what I am doing, and all the different projects that I am currently involved in, a lot are much bigger than this one :)