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Garage Shelving.
This is a cracking idea. How to build furniture by drinking beer! That got your attention didn't it! OK, the goal is to put up some shelves in the garage at the lowest price and for the minimum effort. Well, keeping the price down means going out and buying some cheap planks from the DIY shop. Anything is fine for this as long as the size fits the garage.
The next problem though is how to convert a pile of planks laying on the floor into a set of shelves. Well, you could put brackets on the wall but that involves work and expense and also, it requires that you have a wall that you can drill into and which can support the weight of the laden shelves. Well, if wall brackets are out, you must have something to put between the shelves to hold them up. Now you could have bought a shelving system from Ikea of somebody which would come with legs or a back and sides to hold everything up but that involves more money and also effort. My mate Steve came up with a part solution to this problem in Munich one time. He bought some planks from the DIY shops and stole some breize blocks from a nearby building site. He then put the first two blocks on the floor and stood the first plank on top of them. Then he just went upwards with two blocks, a plank and so on. It was great. Cheap, quick to put up and a lot more solid and stable than most of the shelving units that you can buy from Ikea and co. It had two drawbacks. First was the issue of the cost of the blocks. Theft is not for everyone and certainly I would not do that myself and these blocks are not cheap. The second problem arises when you have finished with the shelves. I know that, when Steve was leaving his apartment, there was some friction between him and his landlady about whether or not it was reasonable for him to abandon a load of stolen building materials in the bedroom! Well, when I was thinking about a similar scheme to put up some shelves in my cellar, I realised that there was a much better solution. Here in Germany, beer comes in crates containing twenty half litre bottles. The crates are solid and sturdy and they can easily support four of five shelves piled high with computer books and backup tapes! They are also very cheap and easy to dispose of. The deposit on a crate is three marks here in Germany but that is only a loan, you will get the money back when you return the crate if you no longer need the shelves. So there you have it, drink you way to new furniture! :-) |
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