Tetris!

[cjsmith]

These would be AWESOME in my living room.

Well, they would be awesome once we rip out the paneling and put drywall in, and after we take out that ex-window while we're at it. (There's a window that used to look out onto a patio. That patio is now a room. The window framing, trim included, is still there on the living room side.) When we moved in we were broke, so we covered up the ex-window with three seven-foot bookcases. If that wall were all nicely painted drywall these Tetris shelves would be STUNNING.

But they'd be way out of the budget. Way out.

I suspect it would be possible to make my own. I am the least skilled woodworker on the entire planet, even if you count newborn infants, so I would not be able to depend on kung fu joinery skills to make shelves that wouldn't collapse. I see a few options:

1) Don't ever put any stuff on the shelves. Then you don't have to have excellent joints. A simple miter would do.
2) Put a back on them. They'd look a lot less cool, but they'd be more likely to hold if you put weight on the shelf. (To mitigate the loss of cool, the back could be painted to match the wall.)
3) Hide angle brackets between two layers of wood, or hide flat corner brackets on the back surface.

I don't think you can get away without knowing how to do veneer. Either that or your finish work -- on a lovely wood -- has to be very good.

Comments

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking I should go into business buying them one at a time, and then
reselling the 10-packs for $5000, undercutting their prices but still making a nice margin. :)

(Sadly, I think the deal is that there are two sizes of those shelves, and the $350 price is probably for the smaller of the two, whereas the 10-piece set listed at nearly $7K is probably for the larger.)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I like your business model. You could skim a few units off the top for yourself and the books would still show a tidy profit.

(And yes, I think you're spot-on about the prices and the sizes.)