Industrial Pipe Shelves

Throwing our hat into the ring here... seems like everyone and their brother is doing industrial pipe shelves, amiright? And why not? They're cool looking. They're highly customizable. They're fairly inexpensive for a wall shelving unit.

I talked mr. into these shelves. It took him a little while, but he eventually jumped on the bandwagon along with me.

We have a large green wall in the living room, a wall we refer to as the giant green wall. It sort of accidentally became lime green when we had our house painted. I mean, it was our fault, not the painters', but I digress. The green was particularly vibrant, but it grew on us. Like mold.

Anyway, we went round and round with ideas for this giant green wall. It looked like a green screen without any mural or art or SHELVES on it... and the solution we finally came up with was one that offered both form and function - the industrial pipe shelving phenomenon.

So. I don't have an exact tutorial for you here, because, let's face it, there's no way your wall is the same dimensions as my wall. And even though we measured our faces off, we were still left a little, er, off. So we had to fly by the seat of our pants for a bit there, and by we I mean Justin really, because at that point my job was taking pictures while he screwed stuff to the wall.

So, here are some pictures and explanation.

Measure your wall. It does not have to be giant or green.

Decide how much room you want between your shelves and how many shelves you want total.

Calculate how much pipe you will need to achieve the desired heights/widths. And stuff.

Calculate how much wood you will need to make your shelving.

You will also need the pipe pieces that go from the pipe to the wall on the top and bottom and to support each shelf. The boards we decided on were 12 inches wide, so we went with 1 foot pipe sections here.

You will also need: A floor flange for each section of pipe that is being screwed into your wall - so at the top and bottom of your shelf unit and for the pipes supporting each one of your boards. An elbow for each pipe piece at the top of the unit and an elbow for each pipe piece at the bottom of the unit. A "t" for each spot where the boards are that will allow the pipe pieces to be screwed together along with the support pipes.

The main steps we took were:

Scrub each pipe section, t, elbow, flange, what have you with goo gone to get store stickers off and with clorox wipes to get all the greasy grime off. You may want to use some magic erasers too, if you have some.

Put the Tall pipe sections together.

Cut your wood boards to the right size. Sand and/or distress your wood then stain and/or glaze it.

Screw your tall pipe sections to the wall, making sure you're screwing into studs.

Lay your boards.

If you need to, for longer boards, screw in extra support pipes. Totally optional.

And that's that! Then just dress your shelves! Which could be the hardest part. These shelves have already gone through several iterations.

Also, we have a much bigger piano now, and I think it fills the space in the middle better.

Not necessarily worthy of its own blog post is the fact that we then decided to use pipe for our curtain rods over the patio door and large picture window. So we are totally on trend right now. We are full of pipes.

We could be a plumbing warehouse.

EDITED:

Here's a picture of it all decorated, although the living room has changed since...