It's Not Pretty But It Does The Job

When we moved into our house, the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen didn't have a shelf inside. We decided to keep our cleaning equipment and supplies in there and, after a while, we accumulated so much stuff that it started to overflow into other cupboards. Around this time, the supermarket near where I worked was being refurbished and they were throwing out a load of stuff, including most of a kitchen. I grabbed a few pieces of useful-looking wood and brought them home. One of them was a cupboard shelf that was exactly the right size for our cupboard.

Being under the sink, there are pipes and things in the way. My friend Rich kindly lent me his jigsaw so I could do some fancy cutting. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures before or during the process, so you'll have to make do with the "after" shots:





The trickiest part was taking the cupboard apart so that I could put the shelf in. I had to remove the strut in the middle, which had screws at the bottom:


and at the top:


I then had to remove the board in front of the sink, and the drawer (though luckily not the drawer runners). It fit first time (a rarity for me) and the extra space was quickly filled up:

These were acquired more than ten years ago with a portable CD player and they have been used with various cassette players, CD players, minidisc players, and MP3 players over the years. One of the wires broke near the plug meaning sound only came from one of the speakers. Buying and soldering on a new plug was a possibility, but an easier option was to cut the end off a spare stereo jack-to-jack lead from my box of cables and replace the whole cable. Nice straightforward job. The trickiest part was tying strain relief knots in the exact same place in each cable so that the cable ends were the same length.