Home Reno

A home is the gift that keeps on giving...you something to fix or do. It seems like there is always something that needs to be fixed or can be done, so we're going to strap some tools on and "Home Improvement" the heck out of everything, just like Tim. :)

Hockey Stick Rack

With both our boys playing hockey, we tend to have an overabundance of hockey sticks that get thrown all over the place. Enter the "Hockey Stick Rack", which in all fairness is a pretty easy thing to put together. Just a piece of 2"x3"x8' lumber and 1/2"x4'x4' piece of plywood, a few screws and boom: Hockey Stick Rack. We didn't want our rack to be too large and decided to make it about 18" wide, which fits about 18 sets of sticks. If necessary we could just build another rack and have them side by side.

Basic Cuts

The design is pretty simple to put together with minimal skilled cuts required. Here are the basic cuts:

• 4 pieces of 2x3 wood cut 18" in length form the back and base support (cut down from one piece of 2"x3"x8')

• Cut the 4'x4' plywood in half and then diagonally cut both of the 2' half boards so that you have 5" on the top and 8" in the front for each

• With the remaining plywood, you can cut an 1/2"x8"x18" front fascia to keep the stick toes in place

• We also cut another piece of plywood 1/2"x8"x18" to put on top of the front for the sticks to rest on (optional since you will already have a piece of 2x3 there)

Assembly

To put it all together, basically screw everything together:

• Screw three of the 2"x3"x18" to each plywood along the back spread equal distance down the back (we used 1-1/2" #8 wood screws).

• Screw the remaining 2"x3"x18" in the front about 1/2" back to accommodate the piece of plywood fascia

• Screw the 1/2"x8"x18" plywood fascia in the front (we used 1" #6 wood screws)

New Basement Shelving

It's amazing how much stuff you start to accumulate when you own a home. It just seems to grow all throughout your house like weeds overrunning your garden. It was due time to put up some shelving so that we could properly organize all our supplies and apparently endless amounts of coolers neatly in some form of storage.

Basic Cuts

The design for this shelf was in itself a very basic shelf made of 2x4s, 2x3s and plywood. Here's what we needed to get this thing built:

• 6 pieces of 2"x4"x8' lumber form the legs of the shelving

• 6 pieces of 2"x3"x8' lumber form the shelving base

• 9 pieces of 2"x3"x13" lumber complete the structure of the shelving base (this would be cut down from 2 pieces of 2"x3"x8' lumber with space lumber left over

• 1 piece of 4'x8'x8' plywood that will be cut into three equal 16" boards

Assembly

To put it all together, basically screw everything together:

• Screw two pieces of 2"x3"x8' together with three pieces of 2"x3"x13" to form one shelf structure (we used 3" #8 wood screws). Do that three times.

• Arrange the 6 pieces of 2"x4"x8' three along the back and three along the front equal distances apart.

• Screw the new shelf structure, one at a time, ensuring leveling, to the legs (we used 3" #8 wood screws)

• Once all three shelves are attached to the legs and level, put the plywood boards over the shelf structure and screw down (we used 1-1/2" #6 wood screws)

Laundry Room Shelf

Now this reno is not necessarily one that we would call complex or even difficult to do, but oh my what an improvement it made to our laundry room after it was done.

We had this really old piece of wood that must have been from the Ikea "as-is" section as lost parts because it was essentially a dresser top or something like that. It was about 6 feet long, 18 inches wide and about 2 inches thick that needed to be cut down to about 5 feet by 12 inches to properly fit into our laundry behind the washer and dryer.

We ordered metal brackets that could be discrete and give that "floating shelf" feeling from Amazon.ca (Industrial Black Thicken Floating Shelf Brackets by AddGrace). They're not the greatest bracket that we've seen, but for the price, it got the job done and came with all necessary hardware needed to screw it into the wall. The construction of the product is not as "thick" as they make it out to be when it comes to the thickness of the actual metal used, but to hold up our block of wood, it was sufficient. Luckily for us, we were able to screw the bracket into wall studs (highly recommend doing the same for these) because the wall anchors provided are probably not going to hold too much weight.