... and a carpenter to boot!

This is the HUGE, AWESOME project that my husband has been working on the last few weekends, Labor Day and he even took off work yesterday so he could finally get it finished: storage shelves for our food storage cans. They are designed at an angle so you can put a can on the top of a set of two shelves and it will roll from the top shelf to the bottom shelf so you can remove the oldest cans first (FIFO design).

One of the dilemmas that we have had lately in our house is how to best store our food storage. I try and go somewhat regularly to the dry pack cannery that the church owns so that we can make an attempt at having a rotating food storage system, but we don't really have a good way to store them once I get them home. We have been storing them in boxes but then it's hard to get to the older boxes once you pack newer boxes on top and we can't really move all the boxes out each time so the new ones can go on the bottom. So my husband decided to design his own shelf system so that we can easily put the cans on a shelf and have the older ones easily accessible.

In addition to my husband's talents with the computer and car repair, he has always loved working with wood. Unfortunately this is one hobby that requires a lot of time and money (read: expensive tools). Over his last two birthdays I have given him some woodworking tools so that he could hopefully, one day, do more with his hobby. (So finally, after almost a year and a half, he now had a need for the compound miter saw that I bought him - plus I bought him a stand for it this year so he could use it.)

After drawing up some plans and buying a few more tools, DH built a small scale prototype with some scrap wood. He then made some modifications to the plan and figured out how much wood and screws he would need to buy. After a lot of HARD work, trips to the store, more changes to the plans, lots of cuts and splinters, and several late nights working in the garage and storage room, we have not just one, but TWO wonderful, working storage shelves! Now we can move the cans out of the girls' room downstairs and back into the storage room!

I need to get a picture of M&M with the shelves because she helped her dad out a lot on Monday when he was putting the first shelf system together. The picture with the other kids is the one time that they tried to help out by handing their dad screws - while M&M was at tumbling. And Baby K was AWESOME again on Monday so I could get a lot of work done as well, such as moving all of the cans and boxes out of the storage room to begin with.

And with that, I will now open up the bidding for a sneak peak at these top-secret plans:
starting bid at $100 :)