Elfa hack (planning) |

Anyone else out there in love with Elfa shelving from the Container Store? I swear they are not paying me to plug their stuff on my blog (maybe they should!) but I’ve just been so pleased with the Elfa products we’ve purchased in the past that I have no qualms about saying that I flat out love the whole Elfa line. We previously used Elfa systems in the master bedroom at our previous home:

And for the closet in the nursery at our last place:

The only thing I don’t love about Elfa? The cost. Sure, they have decent sales twice a year, but still, you do end up paying a pretty penny for your new fabulous customized closet. Especially if you want to go beyond the white wire shelving, as we did in our master closet and get their fancier shelves that look like real wood.

Why am I going on about closets we no longer own? Well, because I’ve devised a scheme for the media den I’ve been working on down in the basement for DH. I had originally wanted to do an entire wall of CD storage using Elfa components…until I priced it out. Just the shelves alone were going to set me back around $550, which is much more than I wanted to spend on the whole project. But I did not let this deter me from giving DH’s CD collection some serious display attention.

My new plan? An Elfa “hack:” purchase the Elfa freestanding components for the skeleton of the shelves, and then DIY the actual shelves themselves.

DH has been pretty excited about this whole media den project, so even though he’s not really an avid DIY-er, he took this particular job on mostly on his own. I only have helped with the planning.

I sketched out the Master Plan as I’ve been calling it, in case you’re curious what I’ve been scheming:

The gray are the uprights that will serve as the frame for the shelves, and the brown are the shelves we plan to make. We had originally planned to buy 8 12 ft. pine boards for the shelves, but realized before heading out to buy the wood that there was no way we’d be able to actually finagle shelves that long down the steps into the basement. So the current plan involves doing 16 6 ft shelves, which will work out to the same amount of storage space once assembled.

We have already purchased the five uprights with feet to build a freestanding frame, 4 2 ft. stabilization kits and one 3 ft. stabilization kit. The rest is up to us now. After pricing out several options, we landed on 6 ft. pre-cut pine boards for the shelves, and we also purchased about 96 inches of small, inexpensive quarter round trim. The trim will serve as a bit of a lip to make sure the CDs don’t slight right off the finished shelves in back. The total cost for the materials to make the shelves? Just over $100 — a saving of around $350! Hooray!

DH and I have never undertaken anything like this before, but it is moving along nicely. Here’s a sneak peak of the first upright being installed!