I am looking to use one wall of the garage for floor to ceiling storage, I have looked at the rails in B and Q which accept varying length shelving brackets and have looked in the Ikea catalogue at their floor to ceiling garage storage which attaches to the joists. Can anyone else think of an alternative which is cost effective and sturdy?
A
=================== Fix wooden battens to the wall and then add these:
Cic.
Robert
I went and got a load of rebar from a scrap yard and welded up some "ladders" - painted and fixed to the wall they hold a *lot* of wooden shelves.
I also put some horizontally, side to side, across the garage under the roof. Welded those to the wall ones and all my timber, pipes, etc all lives up in there.
Welding is a doddle, once you get the hang of it and a dead-cheap arc welder with coated rods is fine for this sort of stuff. Much, much quicker (and cheaper) than wood and woodworking joints..
Mind you, some of the garden furniture I made was a tad "over-engineered" and ended up a bit heavy. But no one has nicked it..
Go to your local auction house and buy large bookcases.
ROFL - and would that be cos of weight, or aesthetics... :-)
These are what we used, too - with excellent results. But we didn't bother with battens - even though we have fairly uneven garage walls. It simply required that we took a bit of care when marking up for drilling plug holes, so shelves all ended up level.
Incidentally, not knowing the hole sizes in the brackets, screwfix advised and provided correct screws and plugs. All turned out to be an excellent solution - and I'm far from competent at this kind of thing.
Oh - and the actual shelves were sliced up for us by our local Jewsons, from their ply off-cuts. Very cheap, and a great time-saver. (Also, cut remarkably straight by my standards!!)
What size ply did you use- I'm particluary interested in the thickness and how far apart you set your brackets.
The ply is 18mm thick.
Length of each shelf = 2400mm
It happens that garage wall (brick, not block) is 4800 wide, so we put 2 shelves per row, butted up to each other, so side walls provide convenient end-stop. 5 rows altogether.
Depth (ie front to back) of each shelf = 220mm
Brackets jut out 250mm, and the front of the shelf is flush with end of bracket, so there's a 30mm gap between back of shelves and wall (which is fine for us, cos we don't need to put small things on, which could slip down the back)
Brackets 580mm apart horizontally.
Overhang 40mm at each end.
To align everything, I fixed one end bracket, then held the shelf in place with a spirit level on it, hold other end bracket underneath and mark its drilling positions on wall. (Thinks - I must have been a contortionist, cos this was all done in an afternoon, single-handed). This overcame any uneveness in the walls at the outset. The intermediate brackets were simple then - just offered up to shelf (allowing a bit for any slight sag) and marked and drilled each in turn.
Have not treated or painted the shelves - this is just a garage after all...
The other useful thing was having two drills - one for drilling, the other for screwing. Saved an awful lot of swapping bits.
Sorry if this all sounds a bit basic, but my DIY skills in this area are indeed very basic!
HTH
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