Shelving Hell
Jul. 17th, 2025 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperWe have an older shelf in the garage that somehow got one of the shelves badly bent. This caused me to worry about the stability of the unit, so I ordered a new shelf from Amazon that would fit the relatively small space. Since today is garbage day, I figured I could quickly assemble the new shelf, swap it into place, and dispose of the old shelf.
I was *so* wrong.
The shelf is one of the kinds with the removable boards across the shelf and four panels that need to be pegged together into the uprights to make the layer for the board to rest on. I had assembled a similar shelf from Home Depot many years ago and it was easy.
Except that this shelf had a pegging system that was extraordinarily finicky. Two thin metal tabs had to be inserted into narrow slots in the uprights and then hammered into place. The tolerances weren't. You might have to bend one of the tabs to get it to go in, but if you bent it too far, then it wouldn't seat properly all the way through the hole and would miss the second matching hole. It quickly became apparent that this wasn't a one person job.
So I called up K (who had returned home about half an hour earlier with her dinner) and begged for help. She wasn't thrilled, but came down to help me put this incredible mess together. I could not have done it without her.
When we got done, the shelf was metastable. The top section is held to the bottom by tabs that are extremely loose, so that you cannot pick up the shelf unit by the top half without causing it to come apart. It also seemed to be slightly off-square in an uncorrectable way. Oh, and the center brace on each shelf can be easily knocked out when you try to put something on the shelf below, because the tabs there aren't at all tight either.
I don't know. Maybe the instructions omitted the step involving a set of pliers. Or epoxy. Or something.
Anyway, K left and I went to work emptying the old shelf. Then I tried to move it out of position and the stack of 2x4s next to it fell on me.
Stop laughing.
I finally concluded that they were going to fall somewhere and weren't going to hit anything, so I let them go. Then I wrestled the shelf into position, put a few items on it to hold it down, because only gravity was going to help at this point, and put all the 2x4s back in the gap between the new shelf and the one to the left. By the time I finally got everything loaded back onto the new shelf, I was two and a half hours into this half-hour project and I was completely out of steam.
With the old shelf still to be dismantled and disposed of.
I called up K and begged for some more help. K had worked her full shift as a camp counselor earlier in the day and was not thrilled by this request, but she came down and did it with a bit of help from Julie.
So the old shelf is gone, the new shelf is in place. It will, I hope, remain standing.
Meanwhile, if you are shopping on Amazon, do not buy any of the shelf units with a tabbed design for the shelves, because whatever you pay for them is too much.
Gack.
I was *so* wrong.
The shelf is one of the kinds with the removable boards across the shelf and four panels that need to be pegged together into the uprights to make the layer for the board to rest on. I had assembled a similar shelf from Home Depot many years ago and it was easy.
Except that this shelf had a pegging system that was extraordinarily finicky. Two thin metal tabs had to be inserted into narrow slots in the uprights and then hammered into place. The tolerances weren't. You might have to bend one of the tabs to get it to go in, but if you bent it too far, then it wouldn't seat properly all the way through the hole and would miss the second matching hole. It quickly became apparent that this wasn't a one person job.
So I called up K (who had returned home about half an hour earlier with her dinner) and begged for help. She wasn't thrilled, but came down to help me put this incredible mess together. I could not have done it without her.
When we got done, the shelf was metastable. The top section is held to the bottom by tabs that are extremely loose, so that you cannot pick up the shelf unit by the top half without causing it to come apart. It also seemed to be slightly off-square in an uncorrectable way. Oh, and the center brace on each shelf can be easily knocked out when you try to put something on the shelf below, because the tabs there aren't at all tight either.
I don't know. Maybe the instructions omitted the step involving a set of pliers. Or epoxy. Or something.
Anyway, K left and I went to work emptying the old shelf. Then I tried to move it out of position and the stack of 2x4s next to it fell on me.
Stop laughing.
I finally concluded that they were going to fall somewhere and weren't going to hit anything, so I let them go. Then I wrestled the shelf into position, put a few items on it to hold it down, because only gravity was going to help at this point, and put all the 2x4s back in the gap between the new shelf and the one to the left. By the time I finally got everything loaded back onto the new shelf, I was two and a half hours into this half-hour project and I was completely out of steam.
With the old shelf still to be dismantled and disposed of.
I called up K and begged for some more help. K had worked her full shift as a camp counselor earlier in the day and was not thrilled by this request, but she came down and did it with a bit of help from Julie.
So the old shelf is gone, the new shelf is in place. It will, I hope, remain standing.
Meanwhile, if you are shopping on Amazon, do not buy any of the shelf units with a tabbed design for the shelves, because whatever you pay for them is too much.
Gack.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-19 03:51 pm (UTC)I'll probably get one or two of those heavy-duty plastic snap-together shelves from Home Depot. The one in the closet in my office is working well.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-19 04:04 pm (UTC)The ones that have the slide through bolts (not tabs!) and plywood shelves are sturdiest.
And the nicest are the metal shelves that are wire racks that slide down the poles, as long as they are compatible with what you're storing on them. I have a lot of those in the basement.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-21 06:01 pm (UTC)When I was buying shelves for work (to store metal boxes of paper!), I got one big unit of the tab/particle board type (from the home improvement store, not Amazon, so I could see what they looked like), and three or four of the wire-rack-on-pole style for smaller items.
When I replace the rest of the IKEA shelves (some of them are close to 20 years old) in the workroom, I will probably use the wire-rack style -- I really like having adjustable shelf spacing, and I found that I lost too much space to the actual shelving unit (uprights/shelf depth) to use the snap together plastic as direct replacements.