IKEA hack: FRAMSTÅ as regular glass shelves

Materials:

– FRAMSTÅ

– EKBY STILIG

– LEDBERG

– some bits of wood

Description:

I went to Ikea looking for some glass shelves to display my Chinese teapot collection, but none of the available GRUNDTAL were quite what I had in mind. The FRAMSTÅ shelf was decently priced and very close to  the size I was looking for, but the FRAMSTÅ system wouldn’t fit where I wanted to put my shelves (and is also rather expensive).

So I bought 3 FRAMSTÅ shelves along with EKBY STILIG consoles. The shelves will sag without support in the middle, so I used 3 consoles per shelf. I figured in retrospect that a strip of wood against the wall, supporting the aluminum rail along its length, might have worked just as well as the  console in the middle – next time I might try that instead.

I cut some wood raisers to accommodate the aluminum rail of the  FRAMSTÅ – otherwise the shelves would not lay flat on the consoles. The  FRAMSTÅ shelves are actually upside-down (except for the top one) to show the neatest side of their aluminum trim. The raisers were fixed to the consoles with screws through the available holes in the EKBY. The “raisers” for the top shelf were made to extend beyond the console to the front of the shelf; I used these to fix a 5-section LEDBERG lighting strip. A strip of oak was also fixed to these raisers with decorative tacks: this provides shielding for the light (while also hiding that the lighting strip is a bit wider than the shelf).

I initially planned to paint the raisers in matching white, but once the shelves were assembled they were hardly noticeable, so I left them plain.