Shelving project (aka Viva IKEA)

I've been thinking about improving the storage capacity in our small spare room - used mostly as an office - for some time now. The big question was how. I would dearly have loved to put in a wall-mounted, fold-up bed with storage underneath as the single bed is used only occasionally by Dominic and Leonore (not at the same time). However, without going to the trouble of designing and building my own this was just going to be too expensive. In the end I plumped for wall-mounted shelves above the bed-head. This photo shows the location.

Proposed location of the shelving unit above the bed-head

Online research led me to the Besta range from IKEA from which I originally chose a single unit 120cm(l), 64cm(h), and 40cm(w) with 2 sets of 2 internal shelves. These units can be wall or floor mounted (on short feet or castors) so seemed ideal for the purpose. Having purchased and assembled the unit I decided that I could put another unit alongside it so purchased a similar unit but only half (60cm) the length.

Then it was a question of how best to fit them to the wall. They come with the furniture to suspend them from a wall but the problem I've always found is that the wall stud centres may not be accurately set at the normal 60cm so how to make sure that the weight (25kg for the larger unit) is properly and safely supported. I resorted to a solution that I have used in the past - fixing 45 x 20 mm battens to the wall first and then fixing the shelves to the battens. See photo below for the battens as fixed to the wall. Although the shelves are suspended from only the top batten, the lower one is needed to provide the necessary spacing of the bottom of the unit from the wall.

The support battens fixed to the wall

Having assembled the units and fixed the battens it was then a matter of 'how do I hold the shelves in place steadily enough while fixing them to the top batten?'. To do this I devised a cunning plan. At the lower back of each of the shelving units 45 mm up from the bottom, I affixed to each of the backs of the end pieces a small block of wood (actually some scrap 15mm ply). This then provided a place to rest the shelving unit on the lower batten while fixing the top with screws into the pre-drilled holes. So - no real effort to hold them in place while the screws were driven, just needing to push the top of the shelving unit horizontally against the wall and wallah! This series of photos shows the end result.

Both shelving units attached to the wall

I put a door on one unit to hide some of the messy stuff

Completed units with internal shelves installed. Another
shelf is supplied for the 'door' unit but isn't needed.

All up about 4 hours work including fixing the battens and assembling the units from flat-pack. Where would we be without IKEA?

Woodworking without pain - the end

Applying two coats of oil to the table a couple of weeks apart has provided the protection it needs from the weather - both wet and hot - and makes the birdy guano easier to wipe off. It has also darkened the timber a little as can be seen from the photo below but the marvellous reds of both the base and the top still come through wonderfully.


Out of curiosity I decided to 'weigh' the table by proxy. I weighed a 27cm offcut from the legs which came in at 7kg (unoiled). Based on this the rails, which are the same depth but half as wide will be 3.5kg per 27cm. An offcut of the top came in at 5.25kg for a piece 43.5 x 17.5 cm. Calculating this out for the actual dimensions of the table gives a total weight of 290kg. I don't think it will blow away in a hurry.

Now the next job is to repair the backs of the chairs which have suffered in the weather over several years.

Woodworking without pain - the home straight

Well I'm nearly there - just coming around the final bend and into the home straight. The table is now structurally complete and assembled (and usable!). All that remains to be done is to apply some protection against the weather. I bought a litre of 'Feast and Watson' outdoor furniture oil 'Hardwood' tinge and will apply a few coats of that sometime soon.

Anyway - here it is in all its glory.

A design requirement was that our heavy (Chinese manufactured) chairs should fit in between the legs at the end and underneath the rails when not in use.

The top is secured to the rails by 20 brass 12g x 60mm wood screws (7 for each end piece and 6 for the centre piece) which go in through the bottom of the rails through countersunk and pilot drilled holes into the top. There should be a little side-play in the rail part of each screw hole to allow for movement of the table top due to humidity.

I also cut a circular whole in the top to accommodate our 3-metre wide umbrella. This was achieved by using a hole-saw to cut a 3-inch hole down about 1 centimetre into the top (not the casual mixing of imperial and metric measurements). I then chiselled out the top 1-cm of the hole in order to use the resulting circular hole with the template guide on the router to cut the hole right down through the top. This worked well although I inadvertently let the template skip out of the hole and did a bit of a gouge out on one side. It isn't a big deal and will serve as a permanent reminder for me to be more careful in future. After cutting out the hole I used a roundover bit on both the top and bottom.


The picture above shows the three chairs and the cast-iron umbrella base in place ready for use. Note the faux rails protruding to the outside of each table leg to give the impression that the rails do, in fact, go right through the legs.

Because the top is made up from three pieces of yellow box benchtop, I decided that I would make a feature of the joints between them rather than butting them up tightly against each other. To do this I used the router to take off a 45degree arris along the adjacent edges of each of the three pieces and allow a gap of between 1 and 2mm to allow rainwater to drain through rather than ponding. It is also a little unusual in that the laminations run across the table rather than along the length as is more usual. Had I been more adventurous I might have gone for a diagonal arrangement to add interest.

Finally, although it is probably worth $1000+ due to the material value and the labour, I don't think it will be easy to steal (this is not a challenge). Fully assembled I can barely lift one side off the ground and it will undoubtedly become heavier when oiled.

All up it has taken me about 5 months of very part-time work with the occassional excursion (building a router table for example) along the way. That may seem like a long time to work on a project but our current dining-room table took me about 6 years to complete. That, however, is a whole other story.