I’ve been slowly finishing my basement home office. I wanted to have some shelves on the wall above where my desk will go, and didn’t want Lowe’s or Ikea pre-fab stuff. I generally prefer finished1 wood, not painted. I had a lot of quarter-sawn2 red oak left over from previous projects, both solid wood and veneer faced plywood. The shelves seemed like an opportunity to use some of it up. Unfortunately, the scraps on hand were not always adequate for the required dimensions, so there are some seams. Some came out better than others.

Plan of shelves relative to the desk underneath.

To make the shelves sturdy, I used ¾” birch faced plywood left over from cabinet boxes. Birch faced plywood is not typically used where it will be visible. These shelves will be six feet off the floor, so no one will ever see the tops. I put the good3 side up, and used contact cement to laminate ¼” quarter-sawn oak plywood on the bottom, good side down, which is the more visible surface.

To hide the edge of the plywood, and to add stiffness, I banded each section of laminated plywood with solid oak, ¾” wide by 1½” tall. I cut a ¼” by ¼” by rabbet in the top of the shelf, then cut a ¼” by ¾” dado in the oak banding, both to increase gluing surface and to capture the ¼” plywood, in case the contact cement starts to let go at some point in the future. The resulting shelves are very solid.

Section of plywood and banding.

 

Completed shelf panels. The long panel is upside down. Note the fancy plywood, and the pre-drilled mounting holes in the back edge banding. The short panel shows the birch faced plywood on the top surface.

 

As for mounting the shelves, a system with no visible fasteners would have been super classy. However, I already know the walls are neither flat nor plumb. It seemed like doing a good job of a hidden mounting system would require a not-realistic level of precision in three dimensions. A more clever guy than I maybe could have worked it out, but I settled on diagonal braces, cut from oak, screwed into the studs. To dress up the braces somewhat, I cut a shallow arc on the underside.

Blank for a shelf brace with the intended arc marked.

 

To cut consistent arcs on ten braces, I made a jig to use with my router. The jig is just a template of the arc4, with some blocks to help in aligning the blank. With a guide bushing on the router, the router bit follows the template arc for repeatable cuts.

Jig with a blank held in position.

 

Jig from the top, showing intended arc relative to template.

 

Router base with guide bushing installed

 

Once all the braces were cut, I pre-drilled holes for the mounting screws using a ½” Forstner bit. I made a mistake here by trying to drill too fast. As a result, some pieces rocked a bit to the right as I drilled, resulting in a hole that is not perfectly cylindrical.

Slap-together fixture to hold brace for drilling.

 

Attaching anything (shelves, cabinets, countertops) to a wall that is not flat requires either hiding gaps with trim or caulk, or scribing the piece to fit the wall. I planned on scribing these shelves. I got lucky, and the short shelf looked pretty good on the first try. The long shelf, not so much. Resting the shelf on some ladders, I used a sharp pencil with a spacer block to mark the contour of the wall onto the back edge of the shelf, then used files and sandpaper to cut to the mark. I’m bad at scribing, but I got it close enough that the remaining gaps are not horrifying.

Shelf “scribed” to wall.

 

Mounting the shelves was pretty straight forward. Again, resting the shelf on ladders, I ran screws through the back edge of the banding, then used a level to make sure the shelf was sitting flat when I put in the braces.

Installed shelves.

 

Eventually, I plan on plugging the screw holes to hide the fasteners. I kept the scraps that were removed from the braces while cutting the arcs, so I’ll cut plugs out of those. The poor job I did with the Forstner bit, and resulting out-of-round holes, will hurt me when I start that work. However, I think the shelves look pretty good, and they should hold up as many books as I can fit on them.

 

 

1 I usually use oil varnish.

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter_sawing. When you order quarter-sawn wood from the lumber yard, you’re going to get a mix of quarter-sawn and rift-sawn. Likewise, veneer plywood will be faced with a mix of the two.

3 Cabinet grade plywood always has a good side and a bad side. The good side is graded with letters (A, B, etc) and the bad side is graded with numbers (1, 2, etc). The bad side is still the same hardwood as the good side, but the veneer will be a lower (sometimes much lower) quality. For example, the bad side of the ¼” quarter-sawn oak plywood was just plain-sawn oak. Pro-tip: The veneer faced plywood you can find at Lowe’s is so crappy it’s not even graded the same as commercial veneer faced plywood.

4 I figured the template arc on the jig using trig (thanks, Ms. Henry), and cut it with a circle cutting jig I made a long time ago.