Plastic shelves to store rocks?? Over a long period of time? Outdoors?

@Mark Bischak, Architect Examples of rocks would be 50-pound bags of poultry grit and 50-pound bags of pumice. I use both in various soil mixes. Other examples would be bags of lava rock, bags of base rock, and bags of decorative stone. I always keep a few of each around for various uses.

Are those plastic shelves rated for UV light? They might degrade pretty quickly in the sun.

IKEA has some galvanized metal outdoor shelves that might hold up better, but you did say this is temporary and you're in a pretty mild climate.

Can you just put two units back-to-back to form a 36" deep unit? Tie them together with zip ties. Put it perpendicular to the house so you can access from either side?

@live_wire_oak Even if I had to replace the shelves once every year, it is still 10% the price of building an enclosure with doors. Those shelves cost $40, and a similar-sized enclosure that could enclose those shelves costs $400 and higher.

If you had four of these racks tied together in a 2x2 configuration, it would be virtually impossible for a complete structural failure in one of those racks to bring down the entire assembly or to have the rack fall inwards to the walking path. The basic configuration would be:

* two rack side by side on each side of the pathway, tied together on the main structural supports in multiple places

* each rack on one side faces another rack, with the walking path between them

* each facing rack has some infrastructure to connect them at the top, similar to what I describe in the original post

Any one component in that configuration can fail completely without the entire assembly failing.

@Fori The paver platform on the fence and home sidewall are each about 24" wide. Each of those 24" sections is up against either the fence or the sidewall of the home, with the space between them being filled with decomposed granite. So there is no room for back to back racks. Putting them perpendicular would block the path. It is a narrow side yard.

Occasionally in a thread that I start, I stop receiving any notifications of new posts, and additionally I lose the ability to reference a user in the thread by starting to type "@...". Normally when you type @ there is an automatic appearing drop-down list that matches the substring you type to the list of users participating in the thread. Does anyone know what causes that to happen (other than Houzz being incredibly buggy)? Both of these things have happened to me in this thread.

If it's money you're trying to save, just check out Craigslist for shelves or old workbenches, or a shed. To me, it looks like someone's going to get hurt when they walk next to that flimsy plastic shelving with very heavy stuff on it.

Houzz is incredibly buggy. :)

It is not a redneck hillbilly thing to store gardening supplies outdoors. This is neither junk nor trash. It is actually a common thing in the SF Bay area to store potting soil and gardening rocks outdoors. I had no idea that was a regional thing.