Day 1251: a little weekend project

You ever feel as though you just don't have enough place for all your stuff, especially in the bathroom? When we ran into that problem last year, we decided to install some shelving for shoes. We figured what's good for the goose is good for the bathroom gander.

Here was our staring point. You might be thinking, "What's wrong?" and "Why are you people so insane?" Leaving the second question aside for the moment, the trouble is that this minimal amount room and lack of a cabinet meant we had to take up valuable counter space with our daily toiletries. Not ideal by any stretch.

So we had the idea of creating some inset shelves to hold our kit. The first step was to remove the shelf (the little circles are where the screws were anchored) and the outlet. Our plan was to move the outlet above or below the light switch to make room for the shelves.

You can see there is a stud right in the middle of the space where we wanted to put the shelves. A previous contractor had cut a notch to make room for the outlet's wiring.

We figured out that the shelves needed to be 12 inches wide and 9 and 7 inches high. Allowing for the .75 inch width of the boards that meant we needed a hole: 18.25 high and 13.5 wide. A level and an L-square showed us the way.

A couple saws made quick work of the drywall. Then we had the figure out how to get rid of the offending stud.

We tried a small handsaw that might have worked but would have taken forever. A jigsaw worked better but could only cut about one inch deep. In the end we turned the job over to the Bosch multitool and after some careful cutting to avoid putting a hole through the drywall on the other side (in our hallway) we had our opening.

We lucked out because the piece we cut out was only attached by two nails to the hallway's drywall (you can see them about 2/3 of the way up the board). When we pulled this loose piece out it didn't do any damage to the drywall.

Then we turned to making the shelves. We had plenty of poplar on hand (remnants from other projects). In fact, this was maybe the first project of any size that did not require a trip to Home Depot. Not sure exactly what it says about us that we had enough raw material on hand to do a whole project from scratch. 

Because the bottom shelf would be resting on a support (the sawed off stud) we opted to make the bottom (and top) piece go all the way across (13.5 inches) and rest the sides on it. We weren't too worried about overloading the shelves, but why not take a chance with a les structurally sound design?

Here's the plan with our measurements. With the stud and drywall (and several measurements) we figured we could make the shelves 4.125 inches deep and still be flush with the opening.

A little wood glue, some nails, and lots of clamps made pretty quick work of the assembly.

We used some scrap pieces of .125 inch plywood for the back and were ready to move back inside.

Before installing the shelves and losing all of our maneuvering room, we decided to move the outlet. Given that we could reuse the wiring, outlet box, and outlet this wasn't too difficult. We figured out the location, cut the drywall, pulled the wiring through the box, installed the box, and hooked the outlet back up.

Poof.

We put in a few spacers of wood inside the hole that we could attach the shelves to. Then we turned to the finishing details. We didn't have a ton of room around the shelves, so we took some baseboard molding from our stash of scraps and used the table saw to cut it down to about 1.5 inches before mitering the corners. 

We sealed up all the seams with some putty to make everything look nice to clean. After that dried we put on a base coat of paint. We still have a few more coats to do (including touch-up on the wall) but this project is in the home stretch.