Very Clever!

Wow, I sure can think of a lot of uses for these. Playrooms, kids rooms, family rooms, craft rooms, etc. Thank you Ana!

Hi Ana you make all the instructions very easy to follow and they look even better, so thanks for all your hard work, will post back when have completed project no1!

Nice shelves. Would be great in a playroom.

Love that picture of Shirley Temple!

Oh I love it! It looks like it would be very reasonable to make too, with so few materials!

One question: Have you ever considered doing the wooden peg system for shelving like IKEA uses? I am very leery of going in at an angle- I'd be afraid of wood splintering and mishaps of all sorts, lol. I am thinking of how I can make these without the angled nailing.

You read my mind! We looked at a house last week that had me thinking about how to turn Expedit shelves into built ins. This is in my bookmarks for when we finally find a house! Thanks, Ana!

I have this magazine too, and I love that section. How 'bout those curtain, huh? Awesome............

Thanks for another great plan. This may be just the thing for the dressing room in my house. You rock!

Can 1 1/4 and 2 inch brad nails be used?

Hi Mary, you can use dowels if you want, just make sure you line up the dowels perfectly. A couple of thoughts here from someone who has built a lot of furniture. Toenailing (nailing at an angle) is very easy to do, I usually hold my nailer backwards. But more important is that you do not need much support in the tonailing step. notice how when you put the trim on it covers the dividers and the shelves? This trim holds everything in place and adds to the overall strength. The trim is what holds the dividers in place, and the toenail just makes your life easier before you fasten the trim in place.

Brad nails tend to refer to an 18 gauge nailer instead of a 16 gauge finish nailer. You may need to use a few more nails, but your should be fine. Just use glue, that's what really holds everything together.

Yay! I've been waiting for you to do the expidit shelving for a while now. I really want to make one of these to store all of our daughters extra toys in.

In case there's any cheaters out there (like me) that are on the fence whether to buy or build.. EXPEDIT shelving - the 4 cube & 8 cube - is on sale this weekend at IKEA in Burlington, ON (maybe everywhere??).

The 8 cube is $59 instead of $99 and the 4 cube is $39 instead of $69.

Do you suppose that this could be built strongly enough to be a window bench as well as the storage? (we've a shortage of toy storage and a shortage of seating, I like the two birds, one stone approach.)

This was great info, gives it a great finished, built-in look.

I love it with the solid counter top! I have a HUGE basement that is pretty much one big rec room and I've racked my brain tring to figure out how to furnish it so it doesn't look cluttered and I think these would be great! Thanks Ana. Oh and those tree's are too cute. Here is a link to a super cute fabric tree project you can make with your childs hand =) http://atsecondstreet.blogspot.com/2010/03/mod-podged-hand-trees.html

I love the look of these, so we started building them and we are short of 1 x 12s! 3 was not enough to get the top, sides, shelves and six dividers... we were only able to get two dividers! Am I missing something?

That didn't seem right to me when I started looking over the plans either, so I roughed out a cut plan in sketchup. There's no way to get all the wood out of three 8 foot boards. If you only need two dividers you can do it in three, (if you have scrap, or need fewer shelves); otherwise you need 12 foot boards or four 8 foot boards.

This is great!!! I'm only going to make one of the units instead of 3 because it'll be in a smaller room. It looks like the cut list for the box is for one unit and the cut list for the trim is for 2 units??? Am I looking at this right? What is the shopping list for? One or two units or the whole thing (3 units including a corner)?

We're planning on doing an entire wall, 12 ft wide, to look like built-in "shelves".

Any tips/advice on doing this going from floor to ceiling? :-) Thank you for all your postings Ana!

I love this..Im thinking something like this all along one wall in our game room would be so nice. I'm SO loving the tree sitting on top in the pic! Where can I find one of those!??

I'm lovin' the cubbies, but I really want the pattern for the tree cut-outs!!

hey there! my husband built these shelves and also jigsawed these trees for me. we got the pattern here: http://www.diyideas.com/howto/WorkWithWood/plywood-tree_1.html

we printed it, projected it onto a piece of...hm, it's not plywood (it's thicker)....he traced it, and he needed to make several tries, to be honest...using a projector (we did ours in the garage where we could make it dark) makes it easy to make the trees the size you want...I wanted mine sizeable....

good luck!

First I would like to say I was thinking of making somehting like this and today I come across this article:) I love the tree cut outs but the link is not working for me can someone send them to me please...Thank You

First time builder here. I would like to build this but turn the plan horizontal so my finished product is approximately 60" wide and 48" tall. The only thing I can't figure out is what thickness the shelves are. If I make this out of strictly pine it says the boards are 1"x2" but in the plans it says they are 3/4" thick. Help! Which is it?

The dimensions of surfaced lumber are their rough-sawn thickness. Coming off the saw boards have a very rough surface. It's planed down to a more agreeable surface before it reaches you. Typically it looses 1/4" in thickness and about 1/2" in width.

If you have the material planed to order by the lumber yard, you can sometimes get it slightly thicker, but that's not worth doing unless you are ordering hardwoods. My lumber supplier was willing to go to 13/16", to leave me some room for final cleanup, but I did notice that some boards still have a bit of the rough surface that I'll need to take down on my own with a hand plane.

When you go to buy lumber, you should take a ruler or tape measure with you to check the actual thickness. Some places are selling 1x stock that is actually 5/8" in thickness. Don't buy from those stores. Sorry, don't know which ones are doing that, and I suspect that it's only isolated cases. But it's a warning sign that they aren't selling quality materials.

Hi there! I'm really looking forward to making this, or a similar project for my mudroom. I noticed in the list of tools needed, it lists a Kreg Jig, but it is never mentioned in the directions. Is this only if you use screws instead of nails? And if so, you would use it instead of the angled nails?

Ok. I am a little confused. The expedit shelving is designed for the drona bins. They measure 13x13x15. So 1x12 would not be sufficient in making a shelf deep enough to accommodate these. I want to be able to utilize these bins in my closet. Any suggestions on those to work with out using plywood?! Can you buy 1x16 boards? I wasn't sure if that was possible!? I have seen edge glued ones at Menards but they are only 4ft and that won't work for this project?!

Help!!