apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I LOVE it. I've always wanted to do something like this.

That's looks awesome! I've been wanting to do that for my office. I would love to know how that was done!

I think this looks absolutely AWESOME but I have had the MOST difficult time with floating shelves haha. Mine look absolutely horrible. I can hardly put anything on them, they sag, and they are just a complete pain in general.

If anyone plans on doing something like this to be honest I would suggest hiring a handy man to put the shelves up...It's worth it!!!

Ikea has shelves ("Lack") That look like this. There is a bracket that is screwed to the wall, then a hollow boxlike shelf is slid onto that. The bracket is not visible. However, the screw holes on the brackets never seem to line up with the studs in my wall.

This is beyond cool. And the execution is flawless. I agree. Gorgeous. The space must be really plum.

decrappy, maybe then you should have called the above mentioned handyman ...

i used to have lack shelves (black ones, too :-D ) in my last apartment, and they were brilliant.

Ikea Lack shelves can be arrayed as shown in the pictures. However, installing them requires some careful planning and finesse. I have now hung 4 sets of them and have learned that using a very long level and shimming with either paper, cardboard, or wood is the key to a beautiful continuous run of shelves. Careful planning of the shelf locations and testing potential corner joints is key to avoiding disasters. Ikea Lack shelves cannot be easily scribed into a less than smooth wall.

The shims are applied between the wall and the steel bracket to make the shelf perpendicular with the wall, or applied to the tops of the bracket shelf supports to get allignment between the ends of two shelves. The pre-drilled screw holes do not always allign with a wall stud, so where they do not, a wall anchor is needed for support. Use the slotted holes to hang the brackets so there is some play for allignment.

Ikea Lack shelves hung as an array is not an easy project, but a lot of patience and perseverence by the installer will result in a beautiful library.

Hi, I'm a little late here, but I can give you info on how they built these. The made iron or steel pegs that bolted into the studs, then they sheetrocked over them. They also wired it so that I could have those lamps in the cut outs, and so we could lay one of those flexible light tubes along that glowing shelf.

The shelves are actually narrow boxes with the open side facing the wall. They slid those over the pegs, filled in a few spots that were off, and enamel sprayed them all. Then they taped them off when they were dry and painted the rest of the room around them.

The hardest part was an angled wall where they went in, plus they had to make all the boxes in advance and hope to god they measured properly.

One last thing was that I fought like heck to make one wall of the shelves only 7 inches deep. Bookshelves are always made 12 inches deep, but really most books are no more than 7. So I wanted to conserve space, decrease dust and just make it look cleaner. Thanks for spotlighting it!