DIY Plumbing Pipe Shelves April 14, 2010

Lately we’ve been working on ways to get the most out of our small spaces. Last week we focused on the office.

We have a lot of books that we want to keep on hand, but also keep out of the way. We decided to look into installing a floating shelf up high close to the ceiling. The goal was to have the books accessible from a step stool, yet unobtrusive enough that you could stand underneath them.  A few websites had some nice looking shelves made out of galvanized plumbing pipe, which we were happy to borrow ideas from. These are the posts that we used for inspiration, we found them both on apartmenttherapy.com:

Elizabeth and Mike’s shelves: Click here

Morgan’s shelves: Click here

This is the room/wall we were focusing on.

As you can see, this room needs some help.

Using the ideas we found on apartment therapy, I came up with a design for two shelves, one about 8 feet long and one about 51/2 feet long.

I bought a whole bunch of 1/2 inch galvanized pipe and fitting. Elbows, tees, flanges, etc. The total cost of the hardware (not counting the boards) was about $100. This is some some of the piping partially assembled.

Getting the fittings ready for painting.

I wanted to paint the piping matte black, but I was overridden by our chief design specialist, so we went with a matte green. The paint was actually called Camo.

These are the flanges.

The best way I could think of to paint the pipes was to hang them from a tree. Every piece got about 3 or 4 coats of camo spray paint.

With some twine and a stick.

For the boards, we wanted to use recycled wood. We drove all over Oakland looking for any kind of used 1×12, but couldn’t find any. So we went with some new pine 1×12. We stained it with the darkest stain we could find. The boards and the stain brought the total cost of the project to about $140.

I had to improvise the workspace. Each board got 2 coats of stain.

After everything dried, we assembled it in the room.

Getting it onto the wall was the hardest part, but we managed ourselves.

And the finished product. We are very happy with it.

Alex and Allison

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