The Fruit Room

We've lived in this house for eleven years now, and I have to say the shelves in our storage room have been less than satisfactory.  There was alot of wasted space and the shelves sagged because they weren't built very well.  They weren't heavy duty enough to put much food storage on them, and they were weird sized so you either packed them full and couldn't get to anything or had to leave alot of headroom and wasted space.  We made do for a long time but we were never very happy with them.

A few years ago, I acquired two custom shelf units from a friend that was leaving town.  These units were basically each, four 2X2X3 cels with hardware for adjustable shelves.  I eventually brought one down into the storage room and found that it held my canned fruits and vegetables perfectly with no wasted space.  I started measuring and discovered that I could fit both shelf units and our standup freezer along the back wall.  There was just enough room.

So this week, I deconstructed the original shelves and moved the second set of shelves down, moved the other shelves to the back wall and moved the freezer inbetween them.  Personally I'd have put them next to each other and had the freezer on the end, but I had to compromise with Chimene.  It's okay, though just a reshuffling of the same space.

When I was doing the demolition, I discovered that the people who had built them, had at the same time over and under built them.  It was insane.  The shelves had very little support, but where the cleats were attached to the walls they had used about three times too many nails.



Freezer and shelves

I'm only showing half of this because we haven't gotten the other shelves full yet.  When we do I may post a follow up pic.

The shelves are nice because I can arrange them to hold 2 quart jars, 1 quart jars, pint jars, or jelly jars.  Depending on how I adjust the shelves, I can hold the following on each shelf:

2 Quart........................25
1 Quart........................36
Wide Mouth Pint...........36
Regular Pint..................49
Jelly Jars......................64

Also across the top I can hold 44 three quart repurposed apple juice bottles full of water. 
I'm pretty pleased with how this is turning out.