John Lindal’s Blog

Bathroom Shelf — Part 1

May 10, 2008 on 2:55 pm | In House | No Comments

Our back bathroom is huge. One entire wall is a pair 8 foot high mirror doors, spanning 9 feet. And it doesn’t have a shelf above the clothes hanger bar. What were the remodelers thinking??

Previously, I replaced the shelves in the two front bedrooms. That was easy, because there were already support boards on the walls, so all I had to do was cut to size and add some brackets.

The back bathroom is virgin wall. After a lot of measuring, I decided that the floor was sufficiently level — nothing is level or square in this house — that I could measure up from the floor at both ends to get a rough estimate of where to put the end brackets and build trust that if I mounted one, the other one would not collide with the clothes hanger bar or otherwise be badly positioned. I then screwed one bracket to the wall, tied on a string, ran it over to the other side and through the other bracket, and weighted the string down to keep it taut. After some fiddling, I got the string horizontal, which gave me the location for the other end bracket.

Today, I cut the first of the two boards that will form the finished shelf. Everybody sells 8 foot boards, which is useless for a 9 foot closet. Luckily, DoIt Best sells 10 foot boards, but they are only 7 inches wide, so I need two. Thankfully, the brackets I bought are small enough to not interfere with the clothes hanger bar but still big enough to support 14 inches of shelf.

Total score so far: four brackets mounted on the wall and one 9 foot shelf board in place. Not in that order, of course. I mounted the end brackets, cut the board, manhandled it into position, and then mounted two more brackets near the middle.

Remaining: buy more screws and a 90° screwdriver, mount four more brackets (I already drilled the holes before putting up the first board.), cut the second shelf board into two pieces to fit around the clothes hanger bar supports, screw both shelf boards to the brackets, and install some small brackets to tie the shelf boards to the clothes hanger bar supports.