The Floating Garage Shelves

The floating garage shelves was a quick single day project.  Only a few hours actually.  I got the idea from a youtube video about a guy who cut up some doors and made shelves out of them.  The materials where simply 2x4 and a door and some screws.  I have all of that laying around in my garage from other projects. In fact I have quite a few spare doors sitting around because I've been replacing them one by one in my house.  More on that later.

I'm in the garage with the idea that I'm going to clean it up and reorganize it so that I can build a nice workbench that includes my table saw and compound miter saw and new craigslist drill press, with room for a vice and router table.  I've got big plans but in order to accommodate them, I need to clear out my garage. So naturally I get to wondering what I'm going to do with these doors that I have and I am reminded of the shelves I saw on youtube.

The door I use is a plain flat faced hollow core door.  I set up the table saw for an 8 inch cut and I rip both sides off so that I have two pieces that are 8" wide closed on three sides and open on the fourth.  Then I rip the remaining piece to 8" that is closed on both ends but open on both edges.

I take an old 2x4 that I have that is actually only about 6' long because it was used on another project and I rip it straight up the center so that I have two 1-3/4" x 6' pieces that I set into the hollow core of the shelves and hang on the wall.

Inside the door I discover that the supporting pieces are actually just cardboard.  Not even thin strips of wood, it's straight up corrugated cardboard glued loosely to the 3/16th panels. It easily taps away from the panels, so all I do is use a tool to push the cardboard deeper into the shelf to make room for the 2x4 I'm going to stick into the edge.

The gap between the panels is only 1-1/8" thick, so I needed to rip my 2x4 sticks down to 1-1/8" so that it slides neatly into the edge of the shelf.  I make three like this, and check that they fit into the edges.  Then I find the studs on my wall and screw them into the garage wall evenly at about a foot apart and as level as I can get it.  The first two shelves that are enclosed on three sides are very easy to install because I don't need to do much with them.

The top cleat is identical to the two holding in each shelf.  I attached the bottom two shelves with wood glue. Then after leveling them, I punched staples all along the top back edge to keep it from pulling away from the cleat while the glue dries.

If you look close you can see that there is a keyhole mark in the lower shelf and two hinge marks in the middle shelf.  I used some of the thin strips of wood that I salvaged from when I trimmed the 2x4's down to size to fit it into those grooves and glued it into place.  Then I used wood putty to fill in the little gaps left over.  Now when (if) I paint the shelves, the hinges and keyhole will be mostly hidden.

The top shelf was a bit trickier since it did not have a face on one of the edges.  I first attempted to rip a thin piece of veneer and glue it over the entire edge, as can be seen in the picture below.  After letting it dry for about 2 hours I took off the clamps.  It didn't stick at all, it just fell off.  There wasn't enough surface area on the two panel edges to hold the veneer.

Plan B.  I decided the only way this would work would be to rip another piece of 2x4 down to fit inside the groove of the edge and glue it where there was more surface area.  I cut a piece that was wide enough, but still only about 1/2" thick so as to not be too heavy and cut it exactly as long as the groove in the edge was so that I wouldn't have a lot of gap to fill with wood putty.  Sadly I didn't get any pictures of me gluing the piece into place, but here is a closer look at the end result.  Not too bad, a little paint and it will look normal.  After the glue had dried I thought the edge could use a little work as it was a bit jagged and the 2x4 piece didn't fit in evenly the length of the shelf.  Instead of sanding it all out, I ran it through the table saw and took off about 1/8 of an inch.  Just enough to make it perfectly straight, and then I sanded it a little to smooth the edges.

I attached the last shelf to the wall the same as the first two.  I had a little trouble because the poorly mudded wall was rather uneven near the top, so this shelf is not exactly flush with the wall all the way across.  It is flush at both ends though, and because the cleat is firmly against the wall all the way across, you can't see light through it.

Here are the shelves as they are empty.  I like that they don't have any visible supports, they're just floating there on the wall.

Here the shelves are full of this and that.  I am not sure what will end up sitting on them, the stuff here is just what was handy on the table nearby for demonstration purposes.

All told the project took only a few hours.  I am pretty happy with the outcome, and as usual, I don't plan on finishing the job by sanding them down and painting them.  It's a garage after all, and I don't have to worry too much about looks.  Maybe someday I'll get the urge to finish the job!

On a side note, I do still have a four inch section of the door that didn't get used.  I'm thinking about making a mini shelf right near the bottom a foot below the lower shelf.  I've already got all the pieces, just need to take the time to do it.  It will only take an hour or so and I can put little jars of nails or other tiny items on it.

Brought to you by "The Amos School of Construction"