After an effort comparable to one of the labors of Hercules, I've just finished a new roll cupboard.  Admittedly a lot of the effort involved was used up in getting started.  Now, I know that talking about cupboards is a sure-fire way of losing whatever audience one has to start with, but somebody might be thinking of starting one and may like to look at a picture of mine before the rolls start going onto the shelves.

The cupboard has a number of large bays but within each bay there are some 3 mm (1/8th inch) plywood partitions, put together rather like the separators in ice cube trays.  This ensures that nowhere are there more than four rolls stacked on top of each other, so the boxes don't get crushed and the bottom roll can always be easily pulled out.  Making one of those cabinets where every roll has its own pigeon-hole was beyond my carpentry abilities and such an arrangement would be wasteful of space if one needs to store small rolls next to large ones.  This is exactly what one needs to do when shelving a sonata set, for instance, or when shelving rolls by composer and opus number.

Having some inner partitions, but not too many seems to work quite well.  I've attached a photo of the new empty cupboard (it won't stay that way for much longer) and a completely full bay in one of other cupboards.  As one can see, there's not much waste space.

John Phillips in Hobart, Tasmania.
Tue, 09 Nov 1999 09:00:44 +1100