After moving into a new flat I needed some shelves to go next to my main desk. One always needs a good set of shelves but imagine designing them to perfectly suit your needs… I’m no carpenter but I think I can figure out a way of making exactly what I want, withough requiring many tools, and still getting a nice, high quality finish.

The requirements

I needed the shelves to fit in the gap between my desk and the wall. I spend a lot of time at my desk and like having access to various things I may need, such as recording equipment and hard drives. And since I no longer have a dedicated mini painting space, this desk will also be used for that. The shelving therefore needs to be sufficiently large as to be practical, but I don’t want it to make the corner of the room feel too cluttered.

Heights

• 22” The bottom shelf would need to be big enough to take my desktop computer.
• 4” I wanted a very short shelf to fit my techy flashy boxes such as my external sound cards, and wifi equipment.
• 12” Then another biggish shelf.
• 8” Tall enough to easily place and retrieve minis.
• 8” Enough room to display an army!

Another requirement was minimal tooling required as I didn’t own much stuff yet after the move, and obviously things like large table saws were out of the question. I ultimately settled on the simple idea of bolting the levels together via pipes and flanges which I found I could order straight from ol’ Jeffy Bezza. These pipes would come in a variety of lengths allowing me to set the shelf spacing to whatever I wanted. Each pipe was threaded at both ends and could have a pair of flanges screwed on, creating a sort of I shape. The flanges each have 3 holes so I can bolt them together through the boards and create a stacked load on each of the 4 corners of the shelves.

What I didn’t realise that this was some kind of social media trend at the time but apparently I designed the most basic-bitch home DIY shelves imaginable, but I really liked the design! It looked cool and hopefully was quite easy to pull off in a small apartment.

The boards

I bought two 8ft x 30inch boards from HDepot. They cut these into six equal shalves. It doesn’t really matter the exact size as long as they’re the same.

I drilled the holes first which actually required a bit of planning (see below for more details on that). Then I sanded them all down by hand to 240 grit, which didn’t actully take that long.

One sanded each board got a single coat of walnut stain on each side. This took some coordinating as my balcolny is not big. So with 30min drying times between each step - I stained two at a time, flipping and staining the oppopsite side, then standing while I did the next pair.

Then each board got two coats of clear satin polyeurethane varnish with 24h drying time between each. I went for water based because it dries faster. I sanded the boards down between coats. By the time they were done they actually looked great! A lot of work but it was worth it.

Lining things up

So the interesting thing about buying construction material from ol’ Jeffy B is the manufacturing quality tends to be crap 🙃. These pipes and flanges were no different. I realised that in when each set of flanges was screwed down tightly onto their respective posts, the orientation of the 3 bolt holes was not consistent. So I would have to line up the holes from the top flange of one post with the bottom holes of a flange on the next post up. This then dictated the position of the 3 holes on the next flange that was screwed into the board above. So I needed to ensure that the holes in each board were in specific paces so that these posts could line up properly.

So in order to do this, each post was given a letter, and each board a number. I marked each board with the screw hole positions after assembling each layer, using a square angled jig to ensure each flange was positioned in the same place on each corner. This was time consuming but was really worth it in the end.

Painting the posts

After I marked the holes and prepared the boards, I gave each post a coat of ‘hammered black metal’ textured spray paint. This dries with a cool surface pattern that makes it look and feel like a high quality hammered cast iron. A small step but made a huge difference to the feel of quality.

Bolting

As shown above each layer was bolted onto the next one, with 3 bolts pointing down through the structure, and the hex nut screwed onto the underside. This would make sure everything was nice and tight. The idea is to ensure that the vertical load is passed directly through the posts and not onto the boards.

Cross bracing

After assembling the first large layer, my lovely wife who is a structural engineer pointed out that the shelves needed cross bracing. Basically the structure is stable from loads applied top to bottom, but could end up wobbling side to side. We would only need bracing on one side, and by putting it across the larges “face” it provided stability which trasnferred through the rest of the scructure. So the tricky part was connecting the opposite diagonal corners of this level of the shelving.

4 bolts on diagonal opposite flanges were connected by steel wire to provide the bracing. The picture sums it up. I had to try a few times to get the length right so that it would be under slight tension but not much. Ideally there is neutral tension until the structure is wobbled.

The result

These shelves are awesome. They’re solid, provide enough storage and look pretty cool if I say so myself. I love that I made them exactly to my own requirements and the fact that they look good as well is a bonus.

The tech stuff shelf is a particular favourite as these devices often don’t want to be stacked up so on larger shelves it can feel like wasted space. I did attach a small usb fan to provide some cooling if it gets too hot. I realise this breaks the crisp aesthetics slightly but I don’t mind!

I want to take on more projects like this and dive further into carpentry itself, but I think it needs a proper workshop to avoid having to rely on HDepot for cutting wood and the like. I think even more specific planning could have let me build them faster, as I sort of figured things out as problems arose.

An enjoable process though, I feel I gained some experience in a few things which I haven’t really done on scale before, such as staining and varnishing the wood.

Cost

The total cost was around $240 CAD (£140) for all the materials. A good chunk of this was the rip off JeffBez price-hiked home-DIY-trending flanges and pipes, which probably could be found cheaper and better quality elsewhere. The nuts and bolts cost a surprising amount too, as did the stain and varnish.

I think this could be done much cheaper but considering what was at my disposal it was okay. For a project which bought me so much joy after a big stressful move it was worth it. And now I have these beautiful shelves which have so far proved incredibly useful!