DO-IT-YOURSELF GARAGE RACK

Send

I was tired of paying for the rental of a warehouse, and I wanted to put my garage in order, so I decided it was time to make racks. At first I thought about buying them, but considering how much they would cost, I had the idea to make them myself.

Shelving design

In between working on two projects, I tried my best to think over the most functional design. About two weeks later, I had an idea. I started by measuring the garage, counting how many shelves I need, and how to divide the space between them. My garage is 5.5 meters long, but considering local standards for the size of timber, it was decided to make a 5-meter rack. The distance from the floor to the ceiling was 2.75 m. The closest board to this size was 2.45 m. Naturally, I did not want to leave a 30-cm gap between the top of the rack and the ceiling, so I will use a 3-meter board by cutting it to the required length. Determining the height of the shelves, I thought about the main goal: the storage of boxes in which you can keep things more organized. My drawers are 42 cm high, but I wanted to leave a small space on top, so the shelf height was chosen 45 cm.
I also need to store some equipment (for climbing, diving, hiking), and I wanted to put it on the shelf. In order not to pile one upon the other, I decided to make one shelf 30 cm high.
At the moment, I, like most homeowners, have accumulated a lot of different things (rake, shovels, snowboard, wetsuit). For all this, I also needed to find a place. Therefore, I needed a compartment where you can hang the hooks and hang everything there or just hide it.
At this point, my collection of tools had grown from a small red box to three drawers and one tool bag. For them, I wanted to make a workbench so that I could work in a garage where it was dry and warm. Ideally, it should be 1.5 m wide.
I still have a dog that loves to nibble everything. My little friend also needs a small place where he can take refuge and keep warm. He was allotted the entire lower left side of the rack.

What is needed for a wooden shelving

After I made the drawing, it was necessary to calculate how much lumber I would need.
I counted:

8 boards 5 x 10 x 500 cm.
23 boards 5 x 10 x 300 cm.
6 sheets of plywood 1.2 x 2.4 m.
Wood screws.

We begin to manufacture the rack

A couple of months ago I leveled the walls, because the previous owners did their best to make them terrible. After puttying and painting, they began to look pretty good. When I got to work, I realized that I hadn’t thought enough about where or how I wanted to place things. I had good thoughts, but in general I was poorly prepared. It was planned to fix the beams of the rack on the supporting beams in the wall. In general, I did not know how to easily determine their location. Fortunately, one of my neighbors had a special electronic device that he shared with me for one day. First, we screwed three beams of 500 cm each: one under the ceiling, the other one meter from the floor and the third at the very bottom. After that, they took 300 cm of the board and cut them to the height of the ceiling. Cut them at a time so that they probably came out the same length.

Making an external frame

After fixing the inner frame, we started to manufacture the outer one. Since its structure was the same, we used the inside as a template.
After the outer frame was ready, we pushed it out, finding that the ceiling sagged a bit and abuts against it. With the help of a hammer, the frame was in the right place, where we fixed it on the ceiling. Next, the lower part was installed using the level so that the racks stood vertically.

Shelf fixing

After the frame was aligned evenly and vertically, we securely fixed it in the ceiling, in the floor and in the middle.
Now the difficult part remains - the embodiment of my project into reality. I had to give up 30 cm of the shelf, since when attaching the beams, at least 10 cm of height for each is lost.
After installing the shelf mounts, cutouts were made in the boards near the walls so that the plywood fit snugly and nothing could fall over the shelf.

Addition

Now that everything is assembled, I did not want to spend more money and did not buy the doors that I had originally planned to install. The idea is that you can put doors with horizontal mounting on the beams. And when the garage is open, curious neighbors will not see my collection of things.
Original article in English

Send