We got a tip from reader Sue who wanted to show off her shelving system: I live in a brooklyn apartment and wanted to set up book shelving with a work space without spending a ton or using pre-fab Swedish (think IKEA) materials...
The lumber is reclaimed yellow antique pine that is over 100 years old. It came from M. Fine Lumber Company. The ashen surface of the pine was planed, belt sanded, routed and then stained and finally sealed with a light coat of polyurethane. The support brackets are drilled into the wall studs and able to support 1000 lbs each. They came from www.supportbrackets.com. The shelving supports my ethos (no pun intended) to keep things real and simple.
More pictures and the full explanation can be found here.
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great.beautiful and simple.i always love the contrast between warm organic wood grain and the cold mechanics of metal.the silver screw heads bug me though.black screws that disappear into the brackets would make this truly complete.
That's beautiful wood and I like the way Sue uses curves to soften the open side of the shelves.
On the other hand, the combination of two different size brackets, the white gaps in the vertical lines created by the brackets & odd way the legs don't align with anything else create visual chaos and take away from the sleek horizontals of the shelves themselves. Painting the whole wall black--and I know, a lot of places (especially rentals) don't encourage that sort of thing, but I figure that even if it is a rental, the wall will have to be redone anyway when she takes down the shelves, and if it's her own place, she can do what she wants, so the black isn't really a problem--will eliminate the jumpiness of the various verticals, eliminate those gaps, hide the misalignments, and best of all, accent by strong contrast both the handsome grain of her antique wood & the bright colors of her ceramics collection.
Love it, different sizes/bolts and all. Well done.
Hey, and if you had a ton of books, it would look like those wallpapers posted earlier ;)
i agree w/ magnaverde.
Magnaverde is much more polite than me. This looks like something my father would whip up in his workshop for use in an unfinished basement.
I'm biased though - I hate yellow pine.
I think this will probably look better when it's filled with books!
It looks original, classic and functional.
I'm impressed w/ Sue's resourcefullness and creativity - I might have chosen to do a couple of things differently, but overall this is a really good result.
the shelves are beautiful, the brackets are not my taste, but then they will disappear when the books are there. well done!
my bookshelves are done like that, too (brackets and shelves), but i put battens (is that the word? sorry - slightly vocabulary challenged here) on the wall and screwed the brackets into those - that way i didn't have to drill quite so many holes into the wall itself. the whole construction has been up for 5 years now, filled to capacity, so not trouble stability wise.
i did use pre-fab Swedish materials, though :-) ...
Looks nice, but I'd like to see it with 1000 pounds per bracket. Now that would be an impressive shelf.