Thread: Underbench kitchen island floor shelves

The best way to put it all together would be dowels/Domino and glue, NOT biscuits.

I would highly recommend putting a back in to keep it stable side-to-side, even 6mm ply or veneered MDF would be sufficient (ply is better, though).

1m is a big span for 19mm timber and it will almost certainly sag (and look really dodgy) once it's loaded, 2 uprights will give you about 670mm span which would be much better. You can also pin the shelves through the back for extra strength.

I once had to do something similar and instead of making a whole new unit that took up floor space i fixed the shelves straight to the back of the island bench. Just mark out where you want the shelves and drill pilot holes through the island bench back and then screw the shelves to it from the inside.

Download yourself a copy of Sketchup, its a free computer drafting program that a lot of people on this forum use. Its quite easy to get started, you can draw your shelves in scale to give you actual perspective on how they'll look, even if you just do them in 2-D. If you pick it up easy enough you can then do a simple 3-D drawing. I find it really handy for assessing the proportions of pieces that I design. I'm certainly no guru but even doing the basic outline of something in scale will give you a very good idea of whether the proportions are pleasing to the eye. Failing that, just get yourself some grid paper and draw it up in scale.

Thanks for the advice so far.

I've done up a sketch of the shelves which is to scale and can be seen below but I'll definitely have a look at Sketchup for future projects. I've decided to add in the extra vertical support as per your advice elanjacobs. I'm planning to leave the back open at this point and if stability becomes an issue I'll go from there.

Thanks for the tip double.d but my friend doesn't really want to fix into the back of the island.

If anyone can see anything else glaringly wrong with my design please let me know!

Chode

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Welcome to the forum Chode.

I don't know if you're going to have a choice on fixing the shelves to the cabinet, something that's 185 deep by 740 high is going to have a high center of gravity and be quite tippy unless it's fixed off somehow. Especially if that little guy in the photo is going to be grabbing it for support when he's toddling around. You could make the whole unit higher and then fix it to the underside of the benchtop, or make it a tight fit so there's no fix but the shelves can't roll forwards.

I'd suggest that you have some kind of kick panel at the bottom (beneath your bottom shelves) rather than the voids you've got shown at the moment. The floor in those voids will be a magnet for all kinds of day to day dust and grot from nearby foot traffic, and will be difficult to keep clean.

And don't forget to allow for a very small chamfer on the bottom of the rear of your cabinet, to allow it to ride over the caulk line where the island bench meets the floor tiles. Otherwise the bottom of your shelves may chew out the caulk line in spots over time, and it will look poor if the shelves are ever removed.

Thanks old 1955!

Thanks for your suggestions Justin. You read my mind with the width being on the small side thereby making it a little unstable. I was once again going to see how it went after it was done and then fix it from there. I hadn't thought about fixing to the underside of the bench though so that's a good idea.

The little one doesn't live there no issues there.

Kick panel is another good thought for the reasons you mentioned. I do quite like the look without one though. Maybe I can set it back a bit so it's not visible but stops build up getting underneath.

Thought I would update my progress on this project. I finished the shelves today, and for my first attempt at any decent sized project I couldn't be happier with the results. I wish I had made them for myself now.


Setting up the jig to ensure dados would be in exactly the same position on both sides of vertical components.
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Success!
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Constructed two ends that looked like this and then I would join them with two shelves once glue had set.
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Close up of joint
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Dowels ready for the top to go on. The challenge here was getting the holes in the top to line up mm perfect.
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Assembly complete
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Post sanding
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Finished product. Two coats of matt polyeurathene.
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Just a few more for good measure.

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Very nice job

Looks great, good job mate!!

Sent from my D5833 using Tapatalk

Mate,
That looks bloody good! Nice one.