If you have a three bedroom apartment like ours, chances are that you have a fixed cupboard in the smallest bedroom just as we have:

It consists of a handy block of drawers, a rod for hanging up your snowmobile overall in the summer season and a shelve all the way up, way too high to use without a ladder. All in all quite an unusable configuration.

Instead, we preferred to have some more shelvespace there to replace the rod so we set about designing a more practical solution. We thought three shelves would be ideal as three happens to be a prime number. Once shopping, three also turned out to be a very practical number indeed as only one sheet of plywood (244x60x1,6cm) was needed.

The sheet, including having it cut in three equal 80cm bits, the internal width of our cupboard, was around €16 and that was including VAT and a waiting time of 20 minutes.

We chose a shelve depth of 52cm and cut the three shelves to this size at home. The rest material of 8cm strips of ply was used to support the shelves in the cupboard, see photos. In all fairness we did buy an extra shelve 60x40x1.6cm for about €4 that was carefully cut as to conserve the white sides so the supports would look prettier.

For easy access, one of the doors of the cupboard was removed during the construction. Getting it back in place turned out to be quite a challenge but not totally impossible.

Cutting the 60cm boards to 52cm:

Leftovers:

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…don’t throw anything away!

Shelve number 1:

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…easy as it rests on the drawers on the right and only needs a support on the left.

Shelve number 2:

…measure distances from above!

And the final shelve:

Final result:

Tools: screwdriver, handsaw (bedankt voor ‘t lenen Cees!),  measuringtape, chainsaw (just kidding).

Materials: sheet of plywood, bunch of 2cm screws.

Note: Don’t use too long screws so they don’t stick out on the other side – not a pretty site as I imagine! Also, try to avoid having a shelve where a doorhinge is!

Unresolved issue: Remains to be seen what to do with the snowmobile overall in the summer…

Disclaimer: Our shelves are made of plywood. This material does not handle high loads well. Use more sturdy material if you intend to store heavy objects such as your spare snowmobile engine, skis or belt.