When life gives you gale force winds that blow the fences down… make seed shelves out of the salvageable bits of fence!

We had some fairly apocalyptic wind here this winter, coupled with rain that lasted for two months.  Needless to say our fences didn’t fare too well.  They rotted through at the bottom and then blew over.  I needed to make some hanging seedling shelves to make the best of our south-facing bedroom window (and to get the seedlings out of snoozing range of the cats) so I rescued some trellis from one of the fences.  It was basically ready-made shelf.

To make it a bit stronger, I put a screw in next to each nail.  My seedling trays aren’t heavy but I wanted to make double sure that the whole thing wasn’t going to collapse.  Once that was done, I sawed the trellis in half and trimmed the ends.  It made two shelves which are more or less the same size.  Then I put a hook at each corner.  I started by facing them inwards (as you can see in the pictures), but when I came to hang it, it became obvious that it would be better to have them facing outwards.  I put one hook in each corner of both of the shelves, and then added another two hooks on the bottom of the top shelf.  Then I added chain which I (ok, the Engineer) hacksawed to size.  We used plaster-board rawl plugs when we put the hooks into the ceiling to make sure that they would say there.  Then we hung it all up and got it balanced.  I think it’s brilliant!

Astonishingly, during the shelf-making process there was no cat-action, not even when I started playing with chain.  I must have caught them during their down time.