The Tank And Stand
with huge thanx to my Dad for his ace DIY help

As the tank was to live in our kitchen, we decided to try and build the stand to match the kitchen cupboards. As it worked out, we had a spare door and drawer left over from when the kitchen was fitted (about two years before), so these were used.

We like bright colours and were fed up with boring wooden kitchen doors, matched with white walls. When we had our kitchen extended, we choose units in beech with bright terracotta coloured doors. To top this off, we had yellow wallpaper, with the skirting boards painted to match the doors :-

I am probably going to get into trouble when she finds out I put her picture on the web site !!

Since this picture was taken, we have had blinds made for the windows. These are, yup, you guessed it ... yellow !! Actually the material was a real find, it was a matching yellow with an orange pattern that matched the border we had. You can just see a bit of the border on either side of the window/door. The picture (later on this page) of the frame for the upper cupboard shows this border more clearly.

The tank was to be sited to the left of the table shown bottom left in the picture. The rest of this page explains how we (ie my Dad and I) built the stand to house the tank.

The first job was to build a solid frame for the base unit. Due to the size of the tank (24" cube), there would be a considerable weight on the base, so it had to be solid. We built a frame out of 2"x2" pieces of wood and fixed it to the wall :-

The four vertical struts would bear all of the weight of the tank, water, etc, so to distribute this a little, we stood them on four horizontal struts on the floor. This meant that the weight would be spread around the four sides, helping ease the burden on the floor.

Next we cut some side pieces from beech contiboard and fixed them on. The front piece had a large hole cut to allow for the cupboard door and drawer. Struts were fixed inside so that the drawer unit could be fixed above the door. Amazingly enough, this bit worked first time !! The door was hinged directly onto the left hand vertical strut. This was a stronger way of doing it than trying to fix it to the contiboard.

We then had some debates as to the top. Originally, we were going to build a regular lid for the tank, with an opening part to allow access. Whilst we were building the base, we decided that it would look better and be more practical to build another cupboard above the tank. This would give extra storage space above, and allow easier access to the tank.

We started off by building another frame, this time hung from the ceiling :-

The only real problem here was finding the joists !! We made a fair few holes in the ceiling trying to get the right place. Luckily, all of these holes were covered by the top horizontal strut. The top strut and the one on the left, attached to the wall, are the two main load-bearing struts. The rest are there for stability and just hang off the main two. We didn't put one at the top on the right side as there was no need.

The last (main) piece of work was to fix the side and front pieces onto the frame. Unfortunately, we ran out of large pieces of wood at this stage, so instead of using one large piece with a hole in for the front (as we did with the base), we had to make the front out of two vertical pieces, with two smaller horizontal ones at the top and bottom. It actually turned out a lot better than we expected !! Two doors (as we didn't have a big enough piece of beech left to make one door) finished off the stand.

A shelf was built inside the upper cupboard, leaving enough space to allow easy access to the tank. A simple frame was built to hold the lights and this was placed on top of the tank's cover glass.

To enable easy water changes, I added some plumbing that brought a direct source of water to the tank and allowed waste water to empty out through a pipe pushed through the wall. I hope to have more details of that here soon.

We were now all set to build the background ...