The shelves are in, the media closet is finished.

The media closet is finished. I put in the shelves so we could organize the movies, music and video games and I must say ... the closet cleans up nicely.


Before -- This closet was a mess. (Sorry, Megan accidentally deleted the photo that I shot several weeks ago.) Plus, I'm not sure you want to see it. All of our DVDs were either in two of our DVD media towers, others were stacked, along with VHS on the first shelf. We literally had columns of VHS and some DVDs stacked on the shelf almost to the ceiling. Our CDs were still in the boxes we moved them in and we just threw basically all of our entertainment media into this closet knowing that at some point this fall or summer this project would get done.

Well ... thanks to a bad back and needing to recover, this was a good project to rehab it with.

We needed 40 feet of lumber -- broken down into four, 2x4x10' long boards and picked up five, 4' long prefab shelves. Thanks to Home Depot, we got our lumber cut into five, 4-footers and 10, 2-footers. Then, because I know I'm going to need one regardless of whether we choose to do a small deck or some type of pavers for our grandiose patio project, I invested in a circular saw. It made Megan nervous, but I was able to cut the wood down to the length I needed ... 3'11" and 1'11" ... but I took an extra 1/4" off just for good measure.

Then came the fun part. Finding studs, drilling holes, screwing 2 1/2" wood screws into place to hold the boards, and then trying to slide the shelves in...often times having to unscrew the supports to get the shelves in, holding them level and then screwing the support back in...

The result?



And a wife who was impressed. I believe her words were, "Wow. That looks good. I'm surprised you were able to do that? I've never seen you do projects like this before."



I drilled holes to screw in 2x4 baseboards to support the back of some shelving.


And did the same to support the sides.

You can see the original shelf that was in this closet, in the photo on the right. I then added a new "top" shelf to house our myriad VHS and DVDs we seldom watch. The original shelf, being sturdy, nailed and set into its place over time was a great place for our box sets and TV on DVD, since those tend to be a bit more heavy.