"Put up a shelf" she said. "Only a small one - won't take too long". I pulled out a few bits of wide, reclaimed pallet wood from the wood pile, and ran it through my thicknesser to smooth it off a bit. Mrs. chose a piece she liked, and I set to making the shelf. We agreed on an inverted "L" profile, and I set to making it. After a bit of planing, thicknessing, gluing, cutting, drilling, screwing and sanding (about 4 hours in total!) it was made. Not too bad, really, went off without a hitch. Mrs. was pleased, so now to fix it to the wall. This is where things got a bit more frustrating. Remind me never to buy another house with "Dot'n'dab" walls like this one. Dot'n'dab is a 1980's quick fab cavity wall building technique (similar to dry wall) where plasterboard panels are "glued" to breeze block walls with dabs of plaster-like adhesive. The gap between the plasterboard and the blocks is not wide enough for most cavity wall fixings and is too wide to use standard wall plugs. But this was "just a little shelf" so I decided to use up the remaining Fischer cavity plugs I bought a few weeks ago for another job, which was NOT on a Dot'n'dab wall, I might add. First mistake - these don't provide enough "grab" for a shelf and it was hopelessly wobbly, wouldn't last a week. Upping my game, I reached for some metal toggle plugs, but these got stuck on the blocks because they need a wider gap to work and the shelf was even wobblier, so I had to rip them (literally) out. By now the holes were looking more like bullet holes than drilled ones. After much swearing, I remembered I have some duck-off long ass heavy duty plugs designed for Dot'n'dab. These go right into the blocks behind and have a sturdy metal collar you wham into the plug to bridge the gap. Out came the heavy duty drill, and after some more minor cursing, and fertling due to the aforesaid gouged hikes in the plasterboard, bit without any blue pills, I GOT IT UP! It flexes a bit, mainly because of those ducking gaping holes, but it's tied to the ducking breeze blocks, so it's not going anywhere. Hope I never have to take it down. So yeah, a nice productive day if DIY... (Hilarious auto-corrupt "corrections" of my bad language left in for comic effect).
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