I worked on another project in the house during the past year. This one was a bit more than the cat shelf, but nowhere near as involved as the laundry room.
When we moved into the house, there was a pantry cupboard in the kitchen that was, shall we say, a bit on the mediocre side. Actually, all the cabinets were just what the developer put in - generally acceptable but nothing to write up in a message board.
The pantry is a floor-to-ceiling cabinet, a little less than two feet wide. It was divided into two sections, an upper one and a lower one. The shelves were "adjustable" with those plastic supports that fit into holes in the side of the cabinet. They were made of particle board, sometime before 1980, because that's when the house was built. Needless to say, they sagged and didn't inspire a lot of confidence. Also, stuff in the back was hard to get to. To add to the level of dissatisfaction of the cupboard, the shelf that divided the top and bottom had a large arc cut in the left side, rendering its support on that side to no more than an inch or so in the front and back. Again, lots of sag and very little confidence. Sorry, but I have no "before" pictures of this mess.
We went to a home and garden show in the area, and my wife found a guy who made slide-out shelves for existing cabinets. She brought me to his booth, and we were both pleased with his ideas and his workmanship. She got a ballpark figure from him of something like $1500 to do our kitchen, so we had him come out and do an official bid. Well, that was not even in the same county of the ballpark, so we kind of left that idea to blow in the wind.
Some time later, we were in Ikea and my wife found a system of wire shelf/baskets that mounted on slides so you could pull them out. She felt this would be a good solution to our mediocre pantry, and I agreed it certainly was worth a shot. Of course, nothing is that easy.
We had to go back home and measure the cabinets - the shelves had to go through the opening of the door. Naturally, Ikea measures everything in metric, and our cabinets are English, so, while we were able to find a shelf that would go through the opening, there was a
LOT of building out to do in the cabinet walls. I was at a loss to see how this was going to be anything anyone would consider looking good, even for the inside of a pantry cabinet.
I did some measuring, and figured that a tubafor on each side, plus a masonite panel, would build out the sides just about right. My wife said she thought peg board would be a better idea than the simple masonite sides, and while I'm not much of a fan of pegboard, I could see some advantages in using it in such a space.
The rollers for the shelves mount with three screws each, so I positioned the tubafors so the screws would mount into them. I mounted the tubafors to the sides of the cabinet with glue and deck screws. Here's a note of caution: the threads on deck screws are so strong, they will pull the head down into the wood, driving the point further than you want it to go. I broke through the side of the cabinet in several places. Those cabinets are made of some kind of composite, since the breakouts (yes, plural) are not what you would expect of a wood or even a plywood panel. Fortunately, our goal with these cabinets is to eventually paint them, and this cupboard is beside the refrigerator, so my sins are not all that obvious, and when we get around to doing real work in the kitchen, the breakouts will get filled and painted, so it's not a fatal flaw.
I replaced the dividing shelf with a piece of MDF. For something that sagged as much as that piece did, it could have held my weight, since it took quite an effort to bust it up to get it out of the cabinet.
Once the tubafors were in place on the bottom, I was pretty careful about how aligned the holes in the pegboard, since I wanted to use that 1" spacing to align the slides for the shelves. I took two pieces of the pegboard, clamped them face to face, and sawed them both at the same time. Seemed to work just fine.
I mounted the pegboard to the tubafors with glue and finish nails, making sure the nails would not be in a spot where the mounting screws for the slides might be. Pretty much, that meant between the horizontal lines of the holes.
I mounted the dividing shelf in the groove on the front of the dividing span between the top and bottom, set the sides on top of the tubafors, and ran a cleat to hold the back. Then I did the tubafor and pegboard idea in the top part.
The top part has an area where our HVAC ductwork makes a zig between the first and second floors, which limits how far up the slides can go, so I stopped there. A bit of miter sawing was all that was required there.
Then, I had to drill for the mounting screws for the slides. I have a portable jig for drilling bookshelves every inch, and I set that up to let me drill about 8 holes at a time, the full length of the tubafors. The horizontal spacing of the screws did not line up with the pegboard holes, being metric measurements.
I added some trim pieces to the front edges of the tubafor-pegboard assembly to make it look like it wasn't just slapped together.
Then, my wife painted the insides white, I mounted the slides (a few shims were requred, but not all that many), put the drawers in, and loaded it up.
My wife is very happy about the results, and with the refrigerator covering up the deck screw breakouts, she's not even worried about that.
by barfle » Wed Dec 07, 2005 11:09 pm 
[/digression]