I Made a Thing

Shelves

Parts:

Precut stair tops for the shelves. They’re perfect for the project since they are sized perfectly and have a nice beveled edge to give the project a polished look.

Steel pipes, base flanges and caps for the supports. Probably the most expensive part of the project. We bought all the pipes precut, but if you own - or know someone who owns - a pipe threader you could probably buy a long length for less than the precut sections.

Retention clips to clamp pipes to the shelves. Just to be sure they don’t slide around or fall off.

Paint and stain. Some green satin spray paint and a nice brown wood stain. No lacquer or anything so as to keep it simple.

Assembly:

This whole project was dead simple. We put together the supports and painted them assembled as a) they stood up on the base flanges which made them easier to paint and b) we didn’t want to paint the threads of the pipes and deal with the mess that might ensue from that. We let everything set and dry overnight and then got to mounting them. A masonry drill bit and my badass 18V DeWalt made short work of drilling the pilot holes. Tapped in some plastic anchors and mounted the supports. One thing we noticed quickly was that our brick faces were far from being a flat plane, so we had to space out some of the supports. I had some left over rubber sheet that we cut into small squares and put behind the base flanges to adjust the supports to be 90 degrees from the wall. Finally, we placed the shelves on the supports and locked them into place with the retention clips. Two hours of work total for a great looking set of shelves.