Creatrope

Sometimes you just need to convert your clutter.

I had several long pieces of ClosetMaid shelving in the garage. They are easily found at garage sales when people remodel. Even new, these pieces are surprisingly inexpensive, as I believe that ClosetMaid is doing a ‘razor’ and ‘razor blade’ strategy by selling the shelf part cheaply and the posts and shelf holders at a premium price.

They are ridiculously strong and fairly light.

By bending them appropriately, you can convert these shelves into a variety of useful items: magazine holder, monitor stand, paper tray, etc.

First get a piece of shelf.

Cut it to length using a hacksaw. For a monitor stand, I made the ‘vertical’ pieces 4″ and the horizontal shelf 11″ so I needed (2*4″+11″ = 19″ long). Watch for the off-by-one errors in length!

Cut the reinforcing bar all the way through and the parallel bars at the 4″ inch and 15″ mark part way through – so they bend cleanly.

Voila!

For a magazine rack, you’ll want the verticals at least 10″ but the base smaller – perhaps 4″-6″.

I think you can figure out the paper tray on your own.

Let me know if you make other cool things out of this item!

[The one on instructables.com has a little more information on it]