Screwed

I am not a wood-worker of any sort. The guy who built our addition liked to say that he just 'hammered some nails', and that's a good description of my wood handling ability.

When the kitchen was remodeled, we had new cabinets installed. They're nice, though I remember being astonished to find that the cabinets -- both the old ones and the new ones -- were each supported by four or six long screws. I would have assumed that they were supported by ten or twenty, and had buttressing to boot. But those cabinets didn't fall down, and these haven't, either, so I suppose they knew what they were doing.

Not so much with the shelves -- specifically, the two trapezoidal shelves in the corner cabinet. Each of those jewels has fallen once or twice in the eleven years that they've been there. In each case, the shelf's supports -- thin plastic clips -- gave way. Nothing even smashed, not even the glasses on the top shelf, but they've made a great big mess. Both times, we've said we really should do something more permanent than this. But each time, we've gotten more of the clips -- so this is why they gave us so many -- and put the shelf back up.

Now, it's happened again. And this time, we're going to see if we can get better quality supports than those we currently have. Same kind, but metal, with a thicker, longer support lip. If we can, we'll use them. And if we can't, we're going to nail a strip of wood under each side of the shelf, in addition to the clips. I'd like to put braces in, too, but I know my limits -- and that strip of wood is about it. Even there, I'm not sure if I'll be able to do it. That's an awkward place to work in, and we wouldn't want to find that the screws poked through into the next cabinet.

In theory, it's a piece of cake.