DIY Shelving in the garage 2022
I was tired of paying rent for storage space and I wanted to get my garage in order, so I decided it was time to get some shelving. At first I thought about purchasing them, but after considering how much they would cost, I had the idea to make them myself.
Shelving design
In between working on two projects, I struggled to come up with the most functional design possible. About two weeks later, I had an idea. I started by measuring the garage, counting how many shelves I needed and how to divide the space between them. My garage is 5.5m long, but given local lumber sizing standards, the decision was made to build a 5m shelving unit. The distance from the floor to the ceiling was 2.75 m. The board length closest to this dimension was 2.45 m. Naturally, I did not want to leave a 30 cm gap between the top of the rack and the ceiling, so I will use a 3 m board cutting it to the required length. When deciding on the height of the shelves, I thought about the main goal: the storage of drawers in which you can keep things more organized. My drawers are 42 cm high, but I wanted to leave a little space on top, so the height of the shelf was 45 cm.
I also need to store some equipment (for climbing, diving, hiking) and I wanted to put it on a rack. In order not to pile one on top of the other, I decided to make one shelf 30 cm high.
At the moment, like most homeowners, I have accumulated a lot of different things (rakes, shovels, snowboard, wetsuit). For all this, I also needed to find a place. Therefore, I needed a compartment where you can hang hooks and hang everything there or just hide it.
By this point, my tool collection had grown from a small red box to three drawers and one tool bag. For them, I wanted to make a workbench so that I could work in the garage, where it was dry and warm. Ideally, it should be 1.5 m wide.
I also have a dog that loves to chew on everything. My little friend also needs a little place where he can hide and keep warm. He was given the entire lower left side of the rack.
What you need for a wooden shelving
After I made the drawing, I had to calculate how much lumber I would need.
I counted:
- 8 boards 5 x 10 x 500 cm.
- 23 boards 5 x 10 x 300 cm.
- 6 sheets of plywood 1.2 x 2.4 m.
- Screws.
Getting Started with Shelving
A couple of months ago I evened out the walls because the previous owners did a good job of making them look terrible. After puttying and painting, they began to look very good. When I got to work, I realized that I had not thought enough about where or how I wanted to arrange things. I had good thoughts, but in general I was poorly prepared. It was planned to fix the rack beams on the supporting beams in the wall. In general, I did not know how you can easily determine their location. Luckily, one of my neighbors had a special electronic device that he shared with me for one day. First, we screwed three beams of 500 cm each: one under the ceiling, another one meter from the floor and the third at the very bottom. After that, they took 300 cm boards and cut them to the height of the ceiling. They were cut at one time so that they would definitely come out the same length.
Making the outer frame
After fixing the inner frame, we proceeded to the manufacture of the outer. Since its structure was the same, we used the internal one as a template.
After the outer frame was ready, we pushed it out, finding that the ceiling sagged a little and rested against it. With the help of a hammer, the frame fell into place, where we fixed it on the ceiling. Next, the lower part was installed using a level so that the racks were vertical.
Shelf fixing
After the frame was level and vertical, we fixed it securely in the ceiling, in the floor and in the middle.
Now the difficult part of the work remains — the embodiment of my project into reality. I had to give up 30 cm of the shelf, since when attaching the beams, at least 10 cm of height is lost for each.
After installing the shelf fasteners, cutouts were made in the boards near the walls so that the plywood would fit snugly and nothing could fall behind the shelf.
Addition
Now that everything is assembled, I did not want to spend more money and did not buy the doors that I originally planned to install. The idea is that you can put doors with horizontal fastening on the beams. And when the garage is open, curious neighbors will not see my collection of things.
