Got cracking with racking

I’ve missed my final preferred window to fly to the UK but if I’m ever going to be able to, I’ve still got to get a few things organised before I can go. After being delayed for several weeks waiting for a new cutting belt that actually fitted my mower and having got my plant pots sorted out, I’ve at last got my garden back into some kind of shape. Better than it’s ever been actually, although that’s not saying a lot!

I’ve now got to plumb in my washing machine that used to be where my new dishwasher now is, but is still standing in the middle of my kitchen. It has to be moved into my bathroom and until that’s done I can’t do any ‘big’ washes. That isn’t too much of a drawback while it’s so hot and not many clothes are needed but it will become increasingly so once the weather begins to cool.

The other outstanding job is to sort out my ‘atelier’. When I first came here just over seven years ago I brought with me several boxes of tools and other things from my garage back in England which I just dumped on the floor of my ‘atelier’ or ‘cave’. And that’s where most of them have stayed. Over time more stuff has been added until I reached the point a short while ago where I could hardly get in there, let alone move around without climbing and tripping over things.

So I had to do something. The problem was that I’ve never had any storage in there so putting in some racking would go a long way towards helping to solve the problem. And that’s why I placed an order for some on the internet a couple of weeks or so ago. The system that I went for was manufactured by Deuba in Germany and although ‘on sale’, seemed to be remarkably cheap for what it was.

My father wasn’t the wisest man in the world but during his lifetime, he passed a lot of useful advice on to me. One of these was that ‘things are cheap for a reason’ and on this occasion he couldn’t have been proven more right.

Two boxes containing the racking kits that I’d ordered arrived at the end of last week and I’d been waiting for an opportunity to start putting them together, which came yesterday. Here are some shots of what they contained.

The parts of the racks are made out of very flimsy metal that slot together. The second shot above shows how the horizontal rails have two tabs on each end that slot into two corresponding loops on the vertical pieces.

In theory this should be a very straightforward process and it would be if the metal parts were up to the job. However, they’ve been manufactured from metal of the absolute minimum thickness for the finished racks to take the advertised weight (45kg per hardboard shelf) without collapsing and that means that the tabs are very flimsy and can be easily bent just by finger pressure.

So you can imagine that the stresses involved in lining up some quite long pieces of metal, holding them at right-angles to each other and then inserting the tabs end up causing the tabs to bend really easily, with the result that although you can get the tabs to enter the loops, it’s the Devil’s own job to get them to pass right through them cleanly.

Almost every time the tabs enter the loops on the ‘inside’ of the vertical pieces, as shown in the second shot above, but when you apply pressure to them, they bend so the leading edges of the tabs end up on the ‘outside’. You don’t want that, of course, because it would mean that the tabs aren’t properly locked in place.

Yesterday was another very hot day and as there wasn’t enough space to work inside my atelier anyway, I ended up doing the assembly of the first rack in my living room. It took an absolute age of sweat and tears plus a little blood but to be fair, the end result wasn’t that bad, especially for the money.

As the following picture shows, just having the one rack in place has already yielded the results that I’m looking for, namely that the floor is becoming clear so I can move around and stuff is going onto the shelves in some kind of order.

I ordered two twin-packs so I’ll end up with four shelving racks like the one shown above. I think that that’ll solve my problem, especially if I load up my car with items that are rubbish, broken or just that I don’t need anymore (like some old MYRO stuff) and take them to the ‘déchetterie’. All I have to do is steel myself to put the final three together, so I’d better get a move on, have a quick bite to eat and get cracking again.