bloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooog

I spent much of the weekend putting up shelves. We have a small utility room next to the kitchen, where the washing machine lives. There are shelves there. This is a rental apartment, so I wasn’t the one to install those, and they aren’t optimally built: each shelf is individually screwed into the wall via two L-shaped braces, so the resulting levers pull screws out of the wall. The wall is covered in a thick layer of plaster, so the top layer (where the screws are) is porous. Proper shelving systems have full-height vertical mounting rails, which make better leverage.

The plastic dowels holding the top screw in each brace were pulling out of the wall. In fact, I think I’m not the first man to tackle the issue: the bottom screws held well, and the dowels there are gray; the top dowels were orange, and pulled out like carrots.

Given how this is a rental, I needed to replace all this as-is, but better. I distrust handymen, and kinda like doing these things (occasionally).

Porous walls are not great at holding dowels, especially if the previous one fell out. You can drill a bigger hole and put in a larger dowel, but that looked like a temporary solution at best.

What I did was: clean out the holes (with a vacuum); apply primer on the inside; wait a day; fill with acrylic-based glue marketed for concrete applications, and stick in new dowels; wait two days; hang the shelves back. Seems to hold, for now. Glue took two days to dry, so we had a messy space in the kitchen with all the things that are normally on the shelves.

An old-fashioned alternative is to stick in wooden dowels wrapped in a piece of (properly moistened) ‌plaster bandage. I’ll try that if my current attempt fails while we’re still here.