Been cranking that power drill ladies! This week's creative efforts = industrial style box shelving units.
Being geekishly slightly booky people my husband and I are, naturally, in love with shelves. Every room in our house does/will contain them. Not necessarily as a design feature, we just have the books to fill them. But I do personally like them style-wise also. The problem is that they are so damn expensive to purchase. Thus, our cost effective solutions so far have been: crates as a dining room sideboard, old mismatched shelves that I am painting up for the kids rooms (to be revealed at some point), and now these boxy numbers for the kitchen and as bedside tables in the master bedroom.
I grabbed the wooden boxes at a Briscoes sale for $10 each. I used 12 of them for the kitchen shelving unit, so for $120 (+ some nuts and bolts) this sort of thing costs significantly less than what you would pay for shelves in stores. It is a fantastic idea for storage in the kids bedrooms also. You may even be able to grab hold of some boxes or crates for less than $10 each if you are savvy.
Thus, a progress update on the dining room (mentioned here and here). Not quite complete but getting closer:
And in the bedrooms I made 2 low six box shelves and placed them either side of the bed:
If you want to have a go, you will need:
- A power drill (what is it about cranking one of these babies? just a little bit too fun!)
- Flat ended bolts of the appropriate size & matching nuts (rather a lot, I used nearly 100 total for my 12 box shelf)
- A screw driver
- And, depending on the size of your crates, some liquid nails or little reinforcing brackets (only necessarily if your crates are too small for the drill to fit inside them)
I tackled the drilling much like quilting: made four rows of three, then pieced the rows together one by one. My drill fit easily inside the boxes (horizontally) so I drilled through at all four corners and screwed the bolts in tightly to make my rows of three. That part was relatively simple. If my drill had have fit vertically inside the boxes I could have continued with this method to complete my shelf (drilling down into all four corners of each box to attach the rows to each other and, voila, shelf complete). However, my drill was too big to fit this way. So I used liquid nails to stick the rows on top of each other, and I reinforced the rows with little brackets at the back (this may not be necessary, I am just not sure whether the 'liquid nails' is strong enough by itself--it may well be, particularly for smaller boxes/shelves).
So, there you go! I am guessing it took me roughly 2-3 hours, stop and start, to complete. Not bad, really.
If you have a go, send me a pic of your shelves, would love to have a squiz at yours! (And any other cost effective shelving solutions you have in your homes.)
From one shelving lover to another!
:)
x
