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| "C'mon little shelf, now don't be shy, Momma's gonna make you go bye-bye." |
After breakfast, my wife prepared the area by banging out
the nails that had held the shelf’s 1”x2” support blocks into the
cabinets. Thankfully, they all came out
nicely. Unfortunately, she also
discovered that the shelf dug into each cabinet via a dado. We couldn’t tell how deep each dado was, so I
used a hammer and a piece of wood to try to bang the shelf out. But all my careful banging accomplished was
to create fracture lines in the shelf.
So I wouldn’t be able to reuse the shelf. Using my jigsaw, I cut the board in two
places, and my wife removed the pieces.
We’d need to buy another board and cut it to size, but hey, the people
at Home Depot need to keep their jobs, right?
After removing the shelf, we set the microwave on its rear
support tabs and pressed it back against the wall. Then we drew a line along the cabinets and wall
to give us a sense of where the top of the microwave would be. As it turned out, we only needed an
additional quarter inch of height, but because the dado had been routed into
the outside of each cabinet, we would need to set the shelf above the dado, or 5/8”
higher.
After setting the microwave back atop the stove, we debated
on the best way to support the new shelf.
The best solution might have been to widen the dado the needed ¼”, but
that would necessitate taking down the cabinets. So we cleaned up and headed off to lunch, run
more errands, and consult the experts at Home Depot. There, we found a piece of melamine that just
needed ¾” ripped off, but the man working in the lumber area explained that his
saw couldn’t rip it to size for us unless I bought a board twice as wide. We would need to make the cuts
ourselves. We also studied various
options for supporting the new shelf in the hardware aisles, and picked out
three different types of metal brackets.
When we returned, we studied the various brackets, and
determined the best location for each.
We made our measurements, drilled our pilot holes, and installed the
brackets. I know this doesn’t sound like
a lot of work, but it was time consuming, as we had to guess at the best weight
distribution areas, and where the bottom of the shelf would sit, as the bottom
of each bracket would sit below the bottom of the board. As each bracket was different, this proved a
challenge. (Of course, we hadn’t bought
enough of the right kind of screws, so we scrounged from past supplies).
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| David does his best Vanna White impression. (Note our wide selection of brackets!) |
After all this, it was time for dinner. We were exhausted, and we had plenty more work ahead before we could install our over-the-stove microwave. So we warmed up yesterday’s pizza in our old countertop microwave, and enjoyed dinner and a movie.
Tonight’s selection: “Dr. No,” the first James Bond
film. While the villain’s island
compound gets destroyed in the end, it had boasted numerous architectural
features. If he could build such a
place, the least we could do was install a microwave oven. As for building the facilities to house our own
nuclear reactor, that project would have to wait for another day.
Tired, but with the end in sight,
Dragon Dave
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