Woodworking On The Cheap

A few years back, I purchased the Best of Danny Proulx’s Stroage and Shelving* on sale after thumbing through it at my local Rockler store. I’ve made a few projects out of this book now, and I can’t say enough good things about how much I like the plans, the writing, the pictures, and the bood.

Storage Galore

This past Christmas my brother approached me about building some inexpensive, yet utilitarian shelving for his garage. Armed with the plans from this book, a miter saw, a router, a dado jig, some help and supplies, in one day we transformed the entire back wall of his garage from useless to a utilitiarian storage space worth envy. For less than $200.

This project was completed in one day with only hand power tools. Between breakfast and supper three guys sourced materials, cut wood, assembled, installed, stocked, and cleaned up.

* Woodworking On The Cheap is not not affiliated with Amazon.com, Danny Proulx, or anyone else involved in the production and publication of this book in any way.

We used the plans mostly as-is, but made a few modifications for budget / utility reasons. Those were:

• No shelves below 24″ from the floor. We wanted storage space under the bottom shelf for lawn mowers, etc.
• The 2×4’s were left full-length. Sure, we got the short ones, but they’ re > 80″ tall.
• The sill plate on my brothers garage leaves a 3″ gap between the floor & the wall (due to the foundation cinder blocks). We made our shelves deeper so they would hang over the back of the shelving units and meet the wall. This gave us slightly deeper shelves.
• We didn’t cut the vertical members with a radial arm saw & a dado blade set. I made an adjustable dado jig for a router, and we used it to cut the grooves for all four legs of a unit at a time.
• We used 9/16″ thick CDX plywood sheathing instead of 3/4″ thick MDF for the shelves, which meant that our routed groves were just under 3/4″ thick. I used a 1/2″ router up-cut spiral bit with a rub-collar to cut the dados in two passes with the jig.

We started off early in the morning, around 7:00 AM making a run to Home Depot where we picked up a load of 2×4’s, 2×2’s, and four-sheets of plywood. We had Home Depot cut the plywood on their panel saw. While time-consuming (it took them about 20 or 25 minutes to finish) this saved us loads of time, eliminated the headache of trying to cut the plywood with a circular saw & straight edge, and guaranteed accurate cuts so that all the shelves are interchangeable. Even if they’d charged us a per-cut fee, we’d have paid. It’s just that much easier.

Getting straight 2×2’s is an exercise in futility. We picked through and got the best we could, but planned on cutting to minimize the bowing. That worked out pretty well, as we don’t have any lop-sided shelves. It helps that you screw the shelves to the 2×2’s to make the top and bottom frames of the units. You can straighten the 2×2’s up a bit that way.

Our dad showed up just as we were getting back from the supply run, and was an invaluable asset as far as help, hands, motivation, and experience were concerned. His attention to detail (all the shelves are level front to back, shimmed at the floor and attached to a nailer plate along the back wall) help with assembly, cutting, drilling, and driving screws was priceless. It would have taken a few hours longer without the third man.

I routed dado’s while my brother and dad were measuring / cutting 2×2’s for frames. When they finished up cutting, they started assembling the shelf frames. By the time they had those done I was most of the way through the dado cutting, and they started assembling units. I was busy dado cutting until about half-way through the seven units we produced. Once all the dados were done, I started doing assembly while they handled installation. Leveling, shimming, and securing the shelves was a two-person job, while assembling a shelving unit can be done with one. Having three people (and about five cordless drills) made the process go MUCH faster.

We stopped four lunch just after the first unit went in, and by the time supper was ready we’d finished assembling and installing all seven units. We even had the sawdust cleaned up and were starting to put things on the shelves.