As explained in yesterday’s post, I am putting together my how-to posts about the shelves I built for the period of time since my last regular daily posts. It just wouldn’t make sense otherwise, because I was poorly. So here we go, part 4 of the saga of my first substantial IKEA hack.
I ended up in part 3 with the shelves cut and prepared from the table tops, and the cleats built. Everything was ready for installing on the wall. An easy task I thought. Oh dear, I should have thought again. Things didn’t quite go as easily as I’d expected. Anyway, let’s start at the beginning.
First I smoothened and neatened the cleats so that the tables AKA shelves would slide nicely onto them. For once with a non-powertool 😉
Then I marked the drill holes for fixing the cleats to the wall, and got a-drilling. Making sure I marked the left and the right of each cleat, and which number cleat it was. First a thin hole and then a bigger one with enough depth to sink the screws in. With the position of the shelves drawn and measured onto the wall, I then used the thin holes to mark where the plugs should go (special metal screw-in ones for plasterboards, the only ones which hold anything at all in my blasted partitioning walls).
Rinse and repeat. This left me with a nice collection of shelves and cleats.
Now onto the wall, which I thought should be a doddle, but wasn’t. I don’t know what it is about the plasterboard walls in my house, but they drive me bananas. I must have tried and used every specialist plug combo under the sun, and even the screw-in ones didn’t always work. No idea why. But of course, with a lot of persistence I finally managed, but that’s a long way down the line. Eventually the plugs were in and I screwed on the first cleat. So far so good, but whatever I did I never got cleat number 4 to sit securely.
After much cursing and sweating I finally had all cleats fixed on the wall, ready for the shelves.
And then … then I slid the shelves onto the cleats, stepped back to take a photo and … OH NO! Realised I’d made a very silly mistake. I’d not measured wrong, but I’d marked the upper/lower edge of the cleat wrong on the measurements. Why did I not notice earlier? Not even when taking pictures? Why?
I can tell you why: never ever do DIY when you are coming down with something and you are not quite with it. It doesn’t matter that you won’t finish quickly, just wait until you feel better.
So I ended up like this, with the wrongly positioned cleat taken off, and number 4, the one I never managed to stabilise completely.
Harrumph.
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