When I moved into my new apartment, I knew that I wouldn’t be there very long, so I wanted to in invest in furniture that I could take with me when it was time to go. Thus, I began by looking around to see what other neighbors and friends were doing with their items.
My long-tome best friend always moved every year. For some reason, she simply couldn’t sign a lease for longer than a year. The first thing she bought when she had enough money was break-away shelving from Ikea. The shelving comes in cubes and is really easy to take apart and put back together, but it requires a ton of time.
The thing I like most about her break-away shelving is that it is easy to move around. I plan on moving, so it would seem like a good fit. However, it does not hold a whole lot of weight. I love books and have a bunch of them, so it is important that I have shelving that can fit them all.
I looked around for some other options for shelving that could move with me. Because I have a small car and do not want to invest in a moving truck every time I move, I really needed something that could break down into very small sizes. I looked into a plain and simple shelf, but the shelf really was going to be too large to fit inside of my car.
There was one home decorating store in my town that is really contemporary. They have all of the best modern furniture and accessories, so I went to take a look at what they could offer in terms of shelving. The first thing I saw when I went into the store was this hanging shelf made of fabric and metal grids. It was crazy in that it actually hung and could be folded up to fit in just about any car or other place.
However, the fabric shelf really didn’t hold all of the books and accessories that I wanted. I had also seen some friends just purchase slabs of wood and fit them in between cinder blocks. While that looks was modern, it reminded me too much of the 80s. I figured that even if I painted the cinderblocks and shelf, the system still wouldn’t look as nice as I really wanted it too…plus, it would be very heavy to cart around.
Finally, what I ended up doing was to just building a shelf from scratch. I looked online for a building plan for a very simple 6-foot shelf and sure-enough, found one very easily. I had the home improvement store cut the wood to size for me so that all I really had to do when I got home was nail the sides together and installed the L-hooks that would hold the shelves in place.
Now, the larger shelf is still kind of tough to cart around, but it’s easy to take the shelves out and put stuff inside the frame to move. Plus, I built it and am very proud of it, so that makes all the difference.