My Ford E-250 van came with metal shelves installed in the cargo area. It also came with two broken door handles, one on the sliding passenger door and another on the rear door. I don’t know how to fix broken door handles (yet) and so on Saturday, I decided to remove the shelves. If you arrived here while searching for how to remove metal cargo storage shelves from a Ford Econoline E-250 van, you’re in the right place.

Prior to beginning this project I searched the internet for information and found this YouTube video by F48 Films. Although the video is eight and a half minutes long, the man doesn’t touch the shelves until the 3:17 mark, and by 4:40, they’re out.

How hard could it be?

The first thing I discovered is that the two shelving units are connected to one another with a bunch of nuts and bolts. I believe mine had at least eight sets of nuts and bolts that had to be removed. Armed with a wrench in my left hand and a socket in my right, I removed all the bolts.

Next I discovered that the shelves were attached to the ceiling with two brackets. The shelves were attached to the brackets with more nuts and bolts, but the brackets themselves were attached to the ceiling with rivets. I decided to remove the nuts and bolts and save the brackets and rivets for later.

Even with all of those nuts and bolts removed, the shelves wouldn’t budge. After repeatedly pulling on them, I realized there were also bolts going through the floor of the van, holding the shelves in place. But if those were also regular nuts and bolts, wouldn’t the nuts just spin unless a second person was on the ground holding the nut in place? (Spoiler, the answer is yes.)

There, sitting inside my van on a five-gallon paint bucket, I began to freak out.

This van needs a lot of work. Two of the door handles are broken. There are dings all over the body. Soon I’ll be painting and putting up insulation and attaching wood and I don’t know how to do any of those things! My plan all along has been to learn how to do these things by watching YouTube videos. I had started literally the easiest project that I will encounter on this van, and failed. What’s going to happen when I get to the hard stuff?

It was about that time that my buddy Jeff called and asked how the van project was going. He must have heard the disappointment in my voice because within the hour he had arrived at my house with a milk crate full of tools and a moving blanket to lay on the driveway. Jeff and I have been working on projects together for more than 30 years now, so digging into a vehicle is nothing new for us.

With Jeff laying on his back underneath the van in my driveway and me inside the van crawling across the metal floor, we worked our way from one end of the shelves to the other, removing bolts. Eight bolts, twenty minutes, and two bloody knuckles later, all the bolts had been removed.

Pulling out the shelves was as much a moral victory as it was a physical one. Removing them was a small project — probably the easiest one I’ll tackle over the next few months — but it showed me that although I might need a little help here and there, this is going to work out.