We are fortunate enough to have a fairly large walk-in attic storage space on our third floor. The time has finally come to make them functional!
For something as simple as this I am always willing to purchase something (over building it) if there are reasonable options that meet my expectations. I searched a bit to see what my purchasing options were. The most obvious choice was the metal shelving units that I was already using elsewhere in the house and shed:
These shelves are unfortunately ~$80 and are only 4′ wide, which would mean, that for my 16′ space, I need about 3-4 of them – ballooning my budget to ~$300. No thanks.
All I needed from this project was horizontal surfaces that could support weight – I didn’t care what they were made out of or what they looked like. The cheapest building materials I am aware of for doing this type of work is 8ft white wood 2 x 4’s and particle board (which I’m learning is called “Oriented Strand Board”). The particle board I was envisioning (and what I ended up using) is used for sub flooring in a house I think – it can hold weight but it splinters and looks like hell. Perfect!
After this it was just a matter of cutting to length. I don’t have a pickup, so I got some help at Home Depot and just got them to cut two 4′ x 8′ particle boards into four 1′ wide 8′ strips – so just three simple cuts per board. I like to try to keep things as simple as possible for the folks that have to cut the lumber for you at Home Depot since they do it without charging =). I also picked up some 2 x 4’s and some long wood screws. Got them all home and got them down to size and sanded everything as much as possible so that it wasn’t too much of a splinter trap. There were already pre-existing exposed studs along the wall which helped with cutting down on material needs. For each shelf I used a 2 x 4 for the vertical beam along the front (trying to mirror the vertical stud along the wall). Then, I connected the vertical stud and the new vertical beam with a 2 x 4 cross-beam so that the face of the cross-beam was flat against the face of the two vertical beams (see picture below). This gave me ample surface area to drive screws and (I think) is the best way to maximize the weight capacity. I used two 2 1/2″ wood screws per joint.
The other joint option I was considering was using a butt joint of some sort between the cross-beam and vertical beam (using a Kreg pocket hole), but I can’t see how this would possibly be as strong as the way I ended up doing it.
This is probably a good time to plug my impact driver. I started off with just a drill (a Makita, which I love). I, in fact, saw a ton of these drill/impact driver combo sets in the years after acquiring my drill but didn’t get what the big deal was “my drill drives screws just fine” I thought to myself, “stripping Phillips head screws (as often as I was) just comes with the territory.” But I was smart enough to soon realize that there MUST be a reason so many better woodworkers than I have one. So I got a Makita XDT11 Impact Driver and WOW – I get it now. Impact drivers use a sort of hammer action that is applied to the twisting motion of the tool’s drivetrain – what this means is that its ability to drive a screw is ridiculous. This job would have been about 10x harder if I was driving all of these screws with my drill. Very thankful I had an impact driver for this project.
After assembling all of the 2 x 4’s I just set the already ripped particle board down on the cross-beams and screwed them down into the cross-beams to secure them. Job done.
Here is a list of all the supplies I got and the cost:
- (2) 4′ x 8′, 7/16″ thick Oriented Strand Board – ~$11.50 each
- (12) white wood 2 x 4’s – ~$3.23 each
- 1 lb of 2 1/2″ wood screws – ~$9.00
For a grand total of ~$70 for 15 feet worth of 7-8 foot tall shelving that can easily hold >100 lbs of weight on each shelf. I don’t know how I could have done that any cheaper without sacrificing the weight-bearing capacity.
Overall, a jokingly simple project, but I enjoyed the challenge of completing these shelves for as little money as possible.