getting things done

Shelving it

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

During our trip to the city, I was able to pick up a couple of cheap plastic utility shelves for the old basement. Due to lack of space with all our other shopping, I ended up getting one at Costco and one at Walmart. They were the same size and type, but different brands.

Today, I wanted to start setting them up and grabbed the one from Walmart.

The basement stairs are steep with narrow treads, so I tried sliding it down the stairs in front of me. Like an idiot. This set of shelves were held together with nothing but a single strap (the Costco shelves were shrink wrapped). One of the shelves came loose form the others, and the next thing I knew, I was balancing precariously at the top of the stairs, one shelf in my hand, the rest almost at the bottom of the stairs, no way to close the door behind me, and a sudden crowd of cats wanting to check out the sudden stream of blue language.

Thankfully, my husband was able to rescue me. All I really needed was for him to keep the cats away and close the door.

I look forward to when the basements are safe enough that we don’t have to worry about them getting down there.

I decided the other shelf could wait until I was done with this one.

Both of these are 5 shelves tall. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t fit at that height.

I was right.

Even if that support was all the way in (I had to use the flat side of a hammer to get the others in), it would still be too tall.

Which is fine. Four shelves is good enough.

I focused on replacing the sorter shelf, with its many glass jars, first, since it was the most unstable.

A perfect fit! Except…

My apologies for the out of focus picture, but you can see how much space is under the leg, when I leveled the shelf.

So I needed to put something thin under the front legs, while still staying away from wood or metal. What did we have that I could use?

I started looking around in the new part basement when I remembered the stack of old floor tiles I’d moved from the bottom of one of the shelves while cleaning up.

Perfect!

Nice and stable, too. The other leg ended up needing a couple more tiles than this one.

That floor is remarkably uneven!

It didn’t make sense to put all those filthy jars back into the nice new shelf, so I made use of the old laundry sink.

In between soaking and washing batches of jars, I got my husband to bring over the other shelf.

Which was much, much easier to get down the stairs. Amazing what a difference a bit of shrink wrap can make!

Once I got it open, however, and starting looking between the shelves for the parts and pieces, something seemed… off. There seemed to be an awful lot of supports in there. And what was that, stuck under one of the shelves? That’s an odd shape…

So, according to the part list, there should have been 4 top caps, 4 legs, 16 support poles, 5 shelves and 3 wall brackets.

There were 5 shelves, 20 support poles, no top caps, no legs, no wall brackets, and 2… whatever those things are in the picture. I think they’re legs from a completely different style of shelf.

Well, I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I may not have legs, but I still have bricks!

I also used more of those tiles to level the shelf at the front.

I found an email address on the information sheet for this company’s customer service department, so I’ll email them about the parts issue later. This Costco one was a tiny bit more expensive (worth it, just for the shrink wrap!), but also seems to be a higher quality, too. I want to get more of these, and would get more Costco ones, if I had to choose, but not if they’re all messed up like this! :-D

Here is a before and after.

Cleaning the jars gave me a chance to look for chips, and I did end up taking out about 5 large canning jars and another 4 or 5 quart sized ones. Some of the ones I kept did have teeny chips I could just barely feel, but these will never be used for food again, so I was okay with keeping them. The ones with larger chips have the potential to cut someone, so I will probably find a way to use them for something else, where it won’t be an issue. Like bottle bricks.

As we start going through the collection of bottles in the new part basement, we’ll add more to the ones being set aside here, for potential use as bottle bricks. There are also lots more jars in the old kitchen that will come down here, so more of these shelves will be needed just for those.

The wooden shelves will be moved into the new part basement and put into use there, since we don’t have to worry about the wood getting wet in there.

A nice little bit of progress down there for the day. :-) I’m quite happy with it!

The Re-Farmer

Crushed

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I wanted to get some progress in the basements today, but before I continued with cleaning up the old part basement, I wanted to clear things out of the new part basement. I’d been putting garbage bags near the bottom of the stairs, and things were getting pretty cluttered.

It wasn’t just the garbage I’ve been cleaning up from the old basement, though.

Shortly after we moved in, one of the things we’d done was set up wire frame bag holders to hold bags for recycling.

This was back when we still thought recycling was worth doing out here. I’m not so sure anymore.

At the landfill, the only general household recycling they want sorted out is the glass. Everything else is supposed to go into the general bins, which then get shipped to the city for sorting. At first, we would take our paper products to the burn barrel, but with the fire bans in the past two summers, that stopped. Even starting up again in the winter didn’t work out, due to weather. So that all goes to the dump now, instead.

One thing that took some getting used to after the move, is that this province does not have bottle depots. You know all those things you pay an enviro fee on when you buy them at the grocery store? We used to be able to take them in and get that fee back. Here, we just pay the fee and it goes… somewhere.

However, I knew that aluminum could be taken in and sold by weight. It’s one of those things organizations do for charity drives; they collect people’s aluminum, then sell it by weight to raise money. Pop tabs are collected separately, as they are pure aluminum and get a higher price per pound. Pop tab collections are sometimes done to raise money for wheelchairs.

So we’ve been collecting our aluminum for close to 2 1/2 years now.

For a while, we had a wire bag holder for aluminum, another for paper and plastic, and a small bin for glass.

At some point, we needed to make space for company, so it all went into the basement, but never made it back up again.

Since then, we continued to bag the aluminum separately into smaller bags, all of which got tossed into the basement as smaller bags were filled. (Except the tabs from pop cans and food tins. We keep a small jar for those and when it’s full, I run a magnet through them to catch any that aren’t pure aluminum, then transfer them to a 1 gallon jar. We have yet to fill that jar.)

Then we got a can crusher, which allowed us to fit more into the little bags before they got tossed into the basement.

As you can imagine, things were starting to get ridiculous down there.

Today, I fixed that.

Most of this involved combining the contents of little bags into larger ones, but I found 3 recycling bags full of stuff from before getting the can crusher.

I just spent a whole lot of quality time with the crusher.

This is what I got out of the basement.

Six bags of crushed cans. Not everything could be crushed; some of the cans were too big even for our extra tall can crusher, and things like cat food tins don’t get crushed at all. Even taking that into account, each one of those bags is the equivalent of 3 bags of uncrushed cans.

So this is the equivalent of 18 bags of cans, crushed to fit into 6.

I honestly don’t know if this is enough to be worth taking to a scarp yard. They go by the pound, and aluminum is really light.

At least they’re out of the basement.

They are now taking up space in the garage, instead. :-D

I also got out a large bag of regular recycling, plus another 4 garbage bags from the old basement clean up.

Things are looking a whole lot better down there, just by getting this stuff out!

At some point, we will even be able to start using the new part basement as a workshop again!

I’m really looking forward to that. Even if stairs are my nemesis. :-D

The Re-Farmer