Ramming Speed
We had always wanted a rolling ladder, floor to ceiling, honest-to-goodness library in our house, but unfortunately, nobody has the space for such impractical impracticalities in the cramped confines of a southern California home (800 square feet is all we have to play with). Even so, lightning struck Broken Thumbs as he was busy toiling on the new fish tank stand (more on that later); he figured out how to finesse a library into the current living room.
As an open deutschophile, Pointy Shoes openly admires the supremely practical, and all the better if it’s actually from the land of the deutsche touched by the hand of an ostensibly austere engineer in between scheduled laughter and kaffee.
Dieter Rams, possibly Broken Thumbs’ favorite product designer, had come up with the perfect solution to the library problem, and he might be the perfect picture of the ostensibly austere german, gifted with practical genius. His shelving unit for Vitsoe, would be a perfectly pointy-shoes-pleasing addition to our living room and fit the mini-book room criteria.
Beautiful? Yes. Classic? Definitely. Affordable? Not so much.
Starting at a whopping $285 for just a little two foot, two shelf baby unit and over several thousand for a nice setup like the one pictured above, Dieter’s design is sadly way wayy out of reach.
Good thing Broken Thumbs is handy.
A few feet of half-inch bar steel and some standard half-inch L-brackets, and we too can have a beautiful shelving unit.
An expedition to orange box yielded some zesty, yet inexpensive potential materials. Pictured here is a five dollar piece of bar steel, and a one dollar bracket with a few cents of nuts and bolts.
Probably the priciest portion of this home made shelving unit, was the hardwood shelves themselves. Clocking in at a tolerable six dollars a shelf, we hardly broke the bank.
The shelves were coated with a few quick passes of shellac…
..and then notched to fit between the steel support bars…
..before pre-drilling the holes to attach each shelf to the brackets.
Each shelf was dry fit, a couple times…
…before final assembly, with tow-and-a-half inch screws to hold the bracket to the shelf.
A couple holes were drilled to accommodate the long drywall screws that anchor the steel frame to the wall.
Although it’s a little more Atlas (pictured above) then Vitsoe, it clocks in under a hundy; it’s made with parts from any hardware store, and a good ol’ power drill (also german made).
This is the proof-of-concept mock up, and we’ll be creating the real deal after we move the 400lb glass box out of the corner; believe it or not, Broken Thumbs can’t even afford the couple bucks to buy the rest of the bar steel and zinc coated brackets, let alone the hardwood for the remaining shelves.
It could use a bit more refinement, but at about fifty bucks we think it turned out great. Broken Thumbs will need to build a couple more to fill out the rest of the corner, but it’s a start.
Books and ‘zines won’t hit the shelf until our priceless aquarium is out of the way, lest our shelf experiment break our giant glass box; we’ll be sticking to lighter weight DVDs for now…
Und tschüss!
