French cleat storage project

Turns out wanting to take a break didn't last very long. Who would have guessed that after spending all day on a PC at work I would get a little bored spending hours in the evening on a tablet at home going over course materials? Oh well. I'll just have to find some time to squeeze in DIY work to take a break. Speaking of which, things have really quieted down around the house and I'm kind of itching for a project. So when I got a little frustrated trying to get all the kids scooters and trykes organized I decided to try and add some french cleat shelving and change how things are organized.

This is definitely not working.

A long holiday weekend turned out to be perfect timing since I had an early interview last week, leaving me some time afterwards to pick up some supplies at Menards. Not as much time as I would have liked though, b/c since I already had the day off I scheduled a phone interview somewhere else for the afternoon. Yikes. Possibly changing jobs and starting school at the same time? Sure, nothing like piling on options for stress to hit. Nothing some 6" 1x4s, two sheets of plywood, and wood screws can't take care of.

This was also a perfect job for the table saw. For the cleats I just split two 1x4's into two long strips with a 45 degree miter. Then all four pieces went on the wall, putting them on studs plus a few drywall anchors just to keep things tight against the wall. Easy, right? Maybe not.

I ended up not quite sure where the studs were with the finder. There's obviously one in the door frame, and probably one by the switches. But the blue line is a pipe, you can see it between the drywall and foundation. And the red lines on the left are probably studs, but they're way off any standardized measurement I could figure out. Of course, just like everything else in this house.

Testing some cleat fit. Had to work around some stuff already on the wall.

At least I didn't hit anything electrical drilling into the wall, so I think we're all good. Unfortunately, the cleats are only going on the top half of the wall since I don't really feel up to adding masonry bits to attach more. But that might actually work out better, since I want to park stuff under the shelves once they're all up.

At first, all I really want to get out of this is more floor space to park the mower, and a custom shelf for my circular saw. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized these could hold my planes, the jig saw, the sander, the router I still haven't used...the list grew and grew. Plus, looking at it now putting the table saw under there would mean less carrying back and forth every time I use it, which would be pretty great. I love this project.

Plus some extra split 1x4's I think I'll use later.

With the other interview looming, even though the cleats were on I only had time to build a big shelf and try it out, but so far it looks great. Thankfully I have plenty of scrap for more shelves and boxes to store stuff with, and a long holiday weekend gave me some extra time to get back to them. More on that later. But a big thumbs up on this project so far. Not only is it helping with storage, each shelf becomes another gadget to put together for a custom solution. So good.