DIY pipe shelf

When I saw the really nice pipe shelf over at the Brick House, I had an itch to also build a pipe shelf to replace our coat and shoe racks.

So after some quick doodling, off to the hardware store to stock up on pipe and shelves. This was the game plan:

Which translated into this stash. Roughly at least – turns out I forgot a few pieces, and had to adapt the plan a few times throughout.

Some red spray, cause it’s good fun and turns dull steel pipes into awesome red steel pipes.

First, I sprayed all pieces individually for grounding. Pro tipp: Don’t use newspaper but plastic as underground.

Then, later, once more assembled to get all surface covered equally and turn the red nice and vibrant.

Holes to fit the pipes through. Make sure to measure where the holes need to be after a test-assembly. Turns out pipes aren’t produced as smoothly as I expected, so this isn’t an exact science and you don’t want to re-drill these holes.

A long evening of wood staining and waxing later, assembly is relatively quick. Et voilà!

Still missing in this photo is the actual coat rack. Missed a few screws for that.

The shelf is drilled into the wall just at the top end, and rests on its own weight below. Between that and the shelves that provide horizontal stabilty, it seems very solid.

How much effort? Well, first of all if I can do it then you can too. It’s not complicated, just fuzzy. Planned it throughout the course of a week, then the actual procurement of parts, spray painting, wood staining, etc., took up the better part of one and a half days including drying time. (Allow for a bit more if possible, ahem.) The assembly itself was pretty quick.

All parts were easily available at a local hardware store, the wood cut to spec there, but based on available planks.

The full shopping list:

All pipes are 1/2″ (turns out pipes are measured in inch even in Germany, who knew!)

  • 12x pipe 40cm
  • 23x pipe 20cm
  • 3x pipe 15cm
  • 3x pipe 8cm
  • 3x simple pipe connectors (one in, one out)
  • 6x base flange (as feet and wall connection)
  • 18x t-intersection pipe connections
  • 17x 90° angle pipes
  • 2x shelf 128,5 x 30cm
  • 2x shelf 88,5 x 30cm
  • 2x shelf 48,5 x 30cm
  • 3x red metal spray color
  • 2x wood staining dark nut
  • 1x wood wax

Edit: This list doesn’t include the actual coat racks, consisting of another 2 base flanges, 1 80cm pipe, and 8 90° angle pipes each.

A few of the measures are slightly odd to exactly fit our needs, but that’s all pretty easy to customize.

The whole thing is about 2,40m high and 1,30m wide.

Thanks, Morgan, for posting the great tutorial that inspired this!

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