Last Saturday afternoon Nate and I undertook a project in the garage. We don’t have a ton of storage space in our home and for some time we have wanted some shelving in the garage. We had some old white laminate wood just sitting around in the garage that was perfect for the job. Nate and I went to the hardware store to pick up some metal brackets (the typical kind with 3 holes for attaching to the wall and three for attaching the shelving), normal 1.5” wood screws to attach the metal brackets to the wall, and some 0.5” wood screws to attach the shelving to the brackets. We had a good supply of drywall anchors on hand so we didn’t pick up any of those. We were ready to go.

We spent the first little while moving stuff around and planning where the shelves would go. Finally we got out the safety glasses and the power tools. I placed my tool box a few feet away for Nate to sit on while I operated the circular saw. He got his sunglasses out of the car so he could have safety glasses too. 🙂 The circular saw produced a large amount of sawdust (Nate initially thought this was sand) and a fair amount of manliness.

To attach the brackets to the wall with the maximum number of screws in the stud I slightly offset the bracket so one of the top screws and the bottom screw both anchored to the stud behind the drywall. The other screw at the top of the bracket received an alligator-type wall anchor. We used a level to keep all the brackets in line. Nate was in charge of the screws and kept a fresh supply coming (most of the time at least). After a quick primer on ladder safety, Nate was very proactive about reminding me to be careful. What a great time we had together on our quick little Saturday project. This shelving should really help de-clutter our storage closet upstairs. Sweet!

The picture above is not from our project but it does show how much fun we have together.  I look forward to many projects that Nate and I will work on together.  🙂