Instant Furniture

Step 3 Milk Crate Bookshelves

Great nomadic furniture, your books are already packed for your next move.
The only problem is they may slump over time and collapse.

A friend of mine has his walls lined with these, and each time I see them they're leaning just a little more. I haven't heard from him in a while, perhaps he's trapped under a pile of books.

Comments

[pinecone89]

i've been doing this in my dorm room and a really easy way to make them stay together and stable is zip ties. those little plastic ties that are really cheap and readily available at hardware stores will hold them together even if you load them with books. just put about two to each side through the holes in the sides of the crates

[wimwright]

To prevent the sagging and to make the stack a little less likely to topple, try shifting alternate layers (i.e. the second row is shifted a half-crate left or right, and the third row is shifted back to the original position) That way the sides of the crate below support the middle of the crate above. Obviously you'd need some sort of support for the end of the second row (a half-crate perhaps?), but that would be the only extra piece

[Wade Tarzia]

One possible solution to the sagging is by fitting a piece of wood into some gap in the bottoms formed by the flange design (which varies according to manufacturer and method of nesting/locking the stackable crates; I suppose the interlocking function could be lost, but if you used a thin wood, such as 1/4 inch oak sold as moldings and door-jamb things at Home Deport, it might fit though expensive, alas). Screw the wood to plastic, and you now have solid support and you can also call the design "composite" for coolness factor ;-) Historical anecdote: when I was a college student in the dorms, we used to raid broken or 'extra' bureaus for their hardwood draws and stack them just like this to form book/record player niches on our small dorm desks always starved for space.