Recycling the old stand

With the stand done it was tempting to kind of fall into a lull and relax, especially leading into my last long weekend of the summer. But on the other hand, as tempting as it might be to just toss the old media stand on the curb and let the garbage men deal with it, I couldn't quite let go of all that MDF without putting some of it to use. But where?

The wife has been unhappy with some of the shelves in various closets around the house lately. Specifically, the shelves in the kids' bathroom and a hall closet we use for cleaning supplies are much shorter than they need to be.

Lots of wasted space potential here.

The bottom of the stand seemed like a good size to test out a deeper shelf with some trimming on the table saw, and it quickly got the wife's seal of approval. Unfortunately, that was the only piece of the stand big enough to trim and get a new shelf out of. To make more, I had to glue and support multiple pieces to get the right size.

This would be a lot to throw out.

Well, I was happy to spend an afternoon on the table saw to make the wife happy and reduce our waste from the stand. I ended up with four shelves, cutting and gluing various pieces together with this approach three times:

Then they got primed, and before I painted them white I put some plaster over the seams to make them less noticeable.

Ignore the glob of sweat, I did this after an evening run.

These are only getting towels and bath junk stored on them anyway, so they don't have to be perfect they just have to fit. In fact, with the bottoms braced they definitely are not perfect. But that doesn't mean I want to skimp on getting them as presentable as possible.

Decent-looking glossy coat

Lots of work for something no one will ever notice. Worth it.

And it worked pretty well, minus that unfinished edge on the top one. Other than that, if you didn't know to look for seams you'd never notice them now that they're in the closet. Anything worth doing is worth doing well I guess. But what happens to the old shelves? Well they get chopped up for the hallway closet. It's the circle of life people, it never ends.