Of all the types of available shelves out there, these metal adjustable ones may be some of the cheapest, quickest, and easiest to assemble.

I’m sure you’ve seen this type of shelf before. Assembly happens so quickly that it’s almost a non-issue. You can buy the support rails and wooden shelves at any home improvement store. As far as tools go, you’ll need a stud finder, a level, some screws, and a drill. Using the stud finder, find and mark the location of the studs in your wall. Then use the level to line the wall supports up, and use the drill and screws to attach them to the wall.

Now, put the shelf attachments any height you like. One nice thing about these types of shelves is you can make shelves of different heights, and change them later if your needs change.

Toss the wood on the supports, and you’re done. One thing I don’t like about these types of shelves is that without things on them, I don’t think they look very good. However, after you fill them up and add some lighting, they can look pretty good. The vertical wall supports will run you about $5 each, and brackets are about 3 apiece. Plus you’ll need wood.

Link: BrightBulb.com

If you’re into video games and you’re into shelves, you’ve probably run across these in one form or another.

The problem? These (the unpainted ones) are $700.

These, with the colored backings, are $1,300. Plus shipping. Or, I believe you can order them for $120 per block. For the record, for $120 you can easily buy a non-functioning Tetris arcade cabinet and just store stuff inside it.

Instructables has instructions on how to build your own Tetris shelves. I’ve never tried it, but it looks like a lot of right angles to me. I can’t imagine they would be that difficult to crank out. If you build some, I would love to see them!

If you are broke, untalented, and/or lazy, you’ll have to settle for these: Tetris Ice Cubes.

No, you haven’t died and gone to Heaven. Needing a place to “store his large book collection,” the owner of this 560 square foot Japanese home turned to the Kazuya Morita Architecture Studio, who covered essentially every available wall with shelves.

The only thing that could make this house more awesome is if there were smaller shelves that went inside the bigger shelves, and then little tiny baby shelves to go inside those.

Goodwill Hunter is back again with some great looking DVD/Video Game shelves for his basement. Unlike his previous, floor-standing shelves, these were designed to hang from the rafters in his basement. Check it out!

My gameroom has once again reached “unholy mess” status. Unfortunately, I have run out of gameroom space, and am forced to confront the reality that all of this stuff won’t fit in a single room anymore.

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… shelf humor.

Thanks Mike!

Although I suspect these are more proof-of-concept than actual product (it’s hard to tell; the original site’s in French), I thought the idea was interesting enough to share. Designed Dany Gilles has created a set of interlocking/stackable shelves, made from recycled cardboard.

While I’m sure the designer was pushing the “made from recycled materials” angle, personally I’m more interested in the shelves themselves. I like the concept of shelves that can be assembled and re-assembled in different configurations. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve built shelves, only to tear them down a few years later when my needs changed.

In theory, you could build a similar set of shelves out of wood … of course, building them out of dead trees kind of goes against the original idea. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. It’s like replacing the engine in your hybrid car with a V8 to make it go faster. I was about to suggest that you could make them out of plastic instead, but now that I think about it, they already did. They’re called milk crates.

Link: DanyGilles.com

Goodwill Hunter is a man after my own heart. When you fill up your shelves, you don’t get rid of things — you build more shelves! Here is another example of shelf building by Goodwill Hunter. This guy is to shelves what I am to … writing about shelves. Take it away, GWH!

The shelves I originally built are now overflowing, so I needed to make another set of shelves to replace one of the two remaining store-bought bookshelves in my gameroom.

A few adjustments to my original plans in the following set of shelves:

Here they are filled with my Genesis collection — a much more efficient use of precious available space.

Each shelf is 44″ wide and holds about 42 games. With 11 shelves in the unit, that comes out to 462 total. I’m about 20 titles away from a complete boxed Genesis collection. This unit holds my A – P titles, while Q – Z are in a similar unit I made back when my Genesis collection fit on one set of shelves.

The following tutorial, originally posted by Goodwill Hunter on Digital Press, was one of the original inspirations for this website. GWH did a terrific job of utilizing the space he had available, and the finished product looks completely professional. So good, in fact, that I once threatened to kidnap Mr. Hunter, chain him up in my garage, and force him to build fantastic shelves for me for all eternity. If only I could find him. With that, I’ll let him take it from here:

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Yesterday, Destri over at The Mother Huddle demonstrated upgrading a cheap set of shelves by adding trim to them. It’s definitely a topic I’ve been wanting to cover, and since hers came out better than mine I decided to show off hers instead.

The first thing Destri did was pick up these cheap (and cheap looking) shelves from Hobby Lobby. According to her post, both combined cost her less than $12. Next, she picked up a miter box and some spare trim.

I have this same miter box. It costs around $8, and comes with a hand saw. It’s plastic, and allows you to cut perfectly straight angles with a hand saw. In the left hand side of the picture you can see the trim she bought. Trim is super cheap.

Believe it or not those are the same shelves, but with trim added! According to her post, Destri used finishing nails to fix the trim to the shelves (you can see them on the front trim piece if you look carefully). If you want to hide finishing nails, hammer them in just a little below the surface of the wood by lining up another nail on top of the first one and hitting it — then, cover the holes with a tiny bit of wood putty.

I’m going to write a longer post about these, but here are the DVD shelves I built a few years ago. In reality they’re white, but I didn’t use a flash in this pictures and they appear yellow. As you can see below, I used smaller trim for the front and sides of each shelf, and used a wider strip for the top. The trim I bought came in white, so I didn’t even have to paint it! I cut each piece to fit using the same miter box Destri used.

Want to upgrade your cheap-looking shelves? Add trim!

Link: The Mother Huddle

When reader Tom (MachineGex) saw this oddly-shaped corner in his game room, he did what any of us would do — he squeezed some custom shelves in there to display his massive collection of Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games!

From Tom: “The NES shelf is actually two separate shelves. If you look at the bottom, you can see how I used the left over shelf pieces to fill the space between the two shelves. I just put extra shelves in between them, and no one can tell that it is actually not one big shelf (see second picture for a better explanation). I also took off the baseboard and cut it to size so the shelves fit nice and snug in the corner area. It gives it a more built in look.”

It certainly does, Tom! Here is the second picture Tom sent, which explains how he “fused” the two sets of shelves.

Later this week we’ll be looking at some of Tom’s other custom shelves he’s put up around his house. Thanks again Tom for the pictures and the write-up!