You guys, I FINISHED THE CELLAR SHELVING WOOOOOOOOOOO.

It was not a whole lot of fun, but I did it.

So the last pieces that needed to be done were:
– flip shelving to cut through braces on the bottom
– reattach new bracing to the back
– cut down plywood to make a new top shelf
– move everything to its new position
– get all scrap lumber to appropriate (reuse, burn, dump) piles

When last I wrote about this project, here’s where I left the shelving.

So, next step, flipping it forward to cut off the bottom part, then re-attaching bracing to the back. Luckily I found some leftover pressure treated 2×2 wood that suited this part quite nicely. Unluckily, I was using these 3″ trim nails with a special star bit head and I stripped, like, three bits before I got the knack of it, sigh.

Then it got flipped right side up (okay actually let’s all be honest here: it went up and down like five times while I was doing this part because I waffled a lot on the best way to do it and spent a lot of time swearing and thinking about giving up).

I also put the last piece of back bracing on – the top shelf support against the cellar wall in the below picture.

Then, I marked up and trimmed down the plywood that had previously been on top of the shelving, in the very safest manner possible, obviously.

(still amazed there were no power tool mishaps)

(though this was the stage at which the following conversation took place)

THEN I FINALLY TURNED IT TO WHERE IT WOULD GO!

This was the moment I finally thought “oh, wow, actually this was all worth it after all.”

While turning it I discovered a whole lot of instabilities that I hadn’t before, so after putting it into this position I spent some time putting screws ev-e-ry-where.

Then, I cleaned up some of the things you can see here in the foreground and moved over the project table to its final location.

Then I moved the leftover printer table that was getting thrown away (well, not like to the dump but it was up for the taking) to its ultimate location to begin life as a seed starting table, about which more next week.

Then I dealt with the scrap lumber, ugh.

Then I added in the organizing bins and lo, they fit perfectly, and put the first project (a coffee table that broke during the move & needs to be refinished anyway) on the big project table.

So, let’s do a before & after, shall we?

aahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh so much better.

This is not my very least favorite project (that’s still the root cellar ceiling, that was the WORST, which I guess I didn’t blog about?) but it’s probably a top 5 and that makes two out of the top 5 in the basement, UGH.

It’s also STILL NOT DONE. Honestly “finish it for the blog post” was the only reason it’s as far as it got this week, it fucking sucked.

Why did it suck, you ask?

Well. Scale is tough in photographs, so I measured. This shelving is 48″ deep by 9.5′ long. So really big. And it is simultaneously very flimsy and very sturdily constructed, in the worst possible combination.

My goal was to cut it down the middle, reattach bracing on the back, and then turn it to a different wall.

It’s so long that I measured my depth (actually a little less than half, at 20″) at various points and then snapped a line with chalk. Because it’s a horizontal surface in a dark corner, and because I had to sort of crawl under rickety nail-filled boards to do so, that took longer than it sounds like. Plus, there was so much dust and paint flakes and sawdust on the shelves the chalk didn’t take very well.

Then I cut down the middle, and discovered that there was a lot more bracing than I thought, and the bracing was too thick for the circular saw, so I had to go back over my lines again with a little jigsaw, and holy shit was it angry with me. Even after that, I’d miss pieces and have to bodily wrench the shelves apart, and then parts I didn’t want to come apart would come off, complete with rusty nails, and it’s a miracle I haven’t cut off a finger or needed a new tetanus booster yet.

The last picture is the current state of affairs, but of course there’s a TON of bracing underneath that is extra deep. It’s actually cut from the top but still not going anywhere.

So on Monday the next step is going to be to move more things out of the way, tip it forward, and cut from the bottom. Then keep it tipped on its face to re-attach the bracing, and while I am hoping to reuse pieces of lumber from the back that is feeling less and less realistic because of the ways it came apart. I may have to go out and buy some 2×2 pieces to replace them and just put the others in the burn pile.

It would’ve been faster to just build new shelving from scrap. This had better be really useful.