My last post detailed the progress (or seeming lack of it) made so far on the remodel of the main closet in my office. I am happy to report that this closet is now complete!¹
When we last left our heroic closet, it looked approximately like this:
Since that time, I added additional baseboard along the long back wall - some of the floorboards didn't quite make it to the back of the closet, so this was my way of covering up those gaps. After that, Caitlin and I painted the inside of the closet a bright white that matches the trim in the rest of the office, and then I was able to replace the old outlets not just in the closet, but in 3 other locations around my office as well. I also installed the face plate for the network jacks and set the shelves in place on their cleats:
These are pieces of 3/4" red-oak-faced plywood which I had cut (a little too long, as it turned out) and stained nearly a year ago. They sat nicely on the cleats and were pretty stable once I installed some small L-brackets to hold them in place, but there was still a notable amount of flex near the middle of the shelves. While they probably would have been okay, I didn't want them to sag over time, so I attached a piece of 1x2 pine to the bottom of the shelves at the front as shown in the photo above. To prevent splitting, I pre-drilled about 10 holes per board (just under an 8' span) and then screwed this reinforcement piece to the shelf above it. This added a lot of rigidity. The final step was to add a face piece to the edge of the shelves in order to clean up the look a little bit. I went back and forth on several options but ended up going with strips of PVC lattice, a little over 1-1/2" wide and around 1/8" thick. I attached them to the shelves using J-B Weld ClearWeld Epoxy. I wasn't sure how well that would turn out but it went much better than I would have guessed.
I mixed up the epoxy and used the stir stick to spread a thin layer on the back side of the face strips and on the edge of the shelf. Then I stuck them together, using two clamps to help wrangle the long flexible strip into place. I left the clamps in place for a few minutes until the epoxy had set, during which time I also used several pieces of painter's tape to hold the strip firmly against the shelf. This worked very well:
The plastic below is to catch any drips from the epoxy, but that turned out to be a non-issue.
After the epoxy had cured (I gave it about 90 minutes) it seemed like the strip was securely in place, so I repeated the process with the next two shelves. This time I used a foam brush to get the epoxy to spread more evenly across both surfaces:
I was quite happy with how well the PVC strip cleaned up the look of the shelves:
And with that, the project was complete! Here's my #shelfie:
¹okay, fine: mostly complete. That space up above the closet needs to have the sliding doors painted and reinstalled. However, they don't prevent me from using the shelves below which means I can get this office back in order! Excitement abounds.