Too many books and not enough storage? Shareable’s Malcolm Harris ran into that problem after moving into a small apartment. With budget concerns in mind, Malcolm solved the storage issue with a few bed slats and cheap brackets from IKEA. Here’s how he did it.
When I moved to Brooklyn, I brought around 750 books with me. I’ve always had a book-buying problem, and I don’t have a parental storage room to access. The consequence is I have to run around with hundreds of kilos of books whenever I’m moving. Once I tricked some friends into carrying them to the fourth floor, I had to figure out a way to store them in a small room in a small apartment.
Having spent all of my shelf money on books, my original plan was to find bookshelves on the street or free online. I probably could have (this strategy worked with chairs), but having boxes and boxes of books piled unopened in your room makes it hard to feel at home in a new space. What I did find on the street was a set of bed slats in reasonably good condition.
My roommate Max faced a similar predicament, so we came up with a solution. We went to Ikea and he got another set of bed slats ($30) and we stocked up on the cheapest brackets they have (two for $2.50). With our third roommate Will’s battery-powered drill, level and stud finder, we screwed the brackets into the wall, laid two slats on each one and screwed those into the brackets. [clear]
With this design, you can adjust the brackets onto studs, making life a lot easier. No sawing wood required. And you can put up a whole wall of them in an afternoon, at just over two bucks a pop.
Ikea’s Cheapest Bookshelves [Shareable]
Shareable is the online magazine that tells the story of sharing. They cover the people and projects bringing a shareable world to life, and share how-tos so you can make a sharing real in your life.
Image: TrotzOlga (Shutterstock).
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