The Easiest Way to Hide Ugly Storage Shelves

This is my studio, or as call it, my TRON room. It's got lights that run around on the ceiling, bunch of 3D printers and cool machines. It's got light-up space window. It's pretty awesome. But it also has something in it that's kind of dumb. Here's my typical studio shot. With the fabric in place, this is what it looks like for the courses. And here it is without the fabric. It's worse, right? Okay, let's make it better. mean, guess it's really just that haven't taken the time to finish it, so it could be better. But that's what we're going to do today. Here it is. So we've got bunch of cool 3D printers up here, setting on really cool stainless steel desktop, and that's setting on some shelves with bunch of storage. And then there's this, just like whole bunch of black fabric that's just like snapped on there. The whole point here was that this was the backdrop for when we shoot our online courses, where we teach Arduino and Fusion. I'll put links down in the description. But wanted to hide the storage, so just grabbed some fabric and clipped it up there with these little guys. Now, this was not supposed to be the permanent solution. really just wanted to cover up the stuff that was stored on these shelves, but it's huge pain. It's oversized, it's floppy, there's no way to hold it up. And so while was trying to come up with an idea, realized have lot of these shelves, like these, and these, and these, and these, and these. So figured if have lot of these shelves, other people probably have them too. So we should make something to make them all look better. So here's the plan. These shelves are pretty much the same, no matter what company you buy from. Basically, they're 36 or 48 inches wide, usually, and they come in two sections. You can stack them to have tall set of shelves, or you can put them next to each other for like workbench, and that's how have them in my room. So we're going to focus on just like one half stack and make cover that will cover the entire face of it. But we have to make sliding panels to fit inside so that we can get to stuff, but also hide stuff. And then we can make it more complicated than it needs to be. For this project, picked up some 1x4s out of Poplar because Poplar paints really well, and even though this is beautiful, need to hide stuff. So all of this is going to get painted black. But before we do that, have to rip all these pieces down in half so that have twice as many. And I'll show you why in second. This video is sponsored by PCBWay, and based on the name, you can probably figure out that they make custom PCB boards. But that's just like one of the many, many things that they make. Under one roof, they can do all sorts of manufacturing, from 3D printing and resin and FDM, from CNC machining to laser cutting and so much more. 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It is fantastic way to try out getting something printed in really unique material, or getting something cut that maybe your machine can't quite fit. Be sure to go check them out, and huge thanks once again to PCBWay for sponsoring this video. Alright, so cut these down into thin piece and wide piece, and it doesn't really matter which one's thin or wide, but the reason cut it into two pieces is so that one can act as the face frame, and then the other one can be glued and brad nailed to it like this, and that can act as the track for the door and maybe some lights. But also having these two together in this shape is going to make it lot more rigid over the four feet, the span of the shelves, which means over time, it shouldn't sag. Now, lot of times, you would want to miter these corners for face frame so that it looks nice, but I'm trying to hide everything, so don't really care. So we have the face frame, that's cool, and then the back piece that goes here needs to have some slots, and those slots just have to be big enough for some pieces of plexiglass that bought. Those are going to end up being the doors. So, we can run this over the blade on the table saw and add those slots pretty easily. The frames are done. They were super easy. And if you wanted to, you could just make the doors out of eighth inch MDF for Luan, cut those pieces down to fit. But I'm gonna use acrylic because like to make things more complicated than they need to be. The acrylic could be cut down to size on the table saw with regular blade or even an acrylic blade. But I'm actually gonna cut it on the laser because also wanna engrave pattern into it. That pattern is so that light can come through. And you may say, Bob, it's clear. Light's gonna come through the whole thing. Not if we paint it black. Truthfully, don't know if this is even gonna work. assume you can laser through paint onto acrylic, but I've never tried it. I've still made little test piece so don't ruin my big pieces. Let's make sure that it actually does what think it's gonna do. This is the side that got the paint and got lasered, and it does not look great. But the other side, that looks pretty awesome. But unfortunately, the spray paint is just not uniform enough, so I'm gonna have to roll these instead. Now theoretically, the panels, the doors, should just pop into the tracks. But before put them in, actually wanna go ahead and try to figure out how to get this attached to the shelves. And think it's gonna be really easy. And it's gonna be easy because of this. There's keyhole built into the upright of pretty much every one of these shelves. Maybe slightly different shaped. But generally, that's how the shelves are held together. So we can take advantage of it and put screw through that hole and drop it down, and there it is, temporarily mounted. You can easily just lift the whole thing up to take it off. So to figure out where this goes, I'm just gonna hold it up to the position that want it to be, and then just mark through one of those holes. Of course, there has to be space above it so that you can go up and drop down. So leave little gap up there. And then I'm just gonna mark one of these on the backside. Now can just measure that spot to the top and do the same thing on the other side so it'll hang level. Five and quarter, five and quarter. Okay, goofed up just little bit, but we can fix it. Basically, measured the total width of this thing to the outside of the frame. Not thinking about the fact that actually had to put in those screws which are not on the outside of the frame. So when found their actual location, it's really close to the inside edge. But luckily, we have enough space here that can take another little scrap and glue it in place right there so have enough meat to drive the screw into. And there's still enough gap here to be able to slide our doors behind the face frame. Actually worked out super well. Now, before put the doors on, have one more thing wanna add. So I'm gonna add LEDs to the inside of this frame so that it will shine through the little cuts in the doors. Now normally, would hook up microcontroller and set up my own LEDs and make my own animations, but already have this for something. don't know where got it. But it's controller that has two separate LED lines that just plug in so can run both of these off the same thing. Now, truthfully, don't even know if the LEDs are gonna work or if you'll be able to see anything through the panels or whatever, but we gotta put the doors on to find out. Of course, it's super difficult to film something that is all black, but bend it in place, drop it in the slot. Cool. Okay, first thing noticed is that used really thin acrylic and they're definitely pretty floppy. They wanna sag, so using thicker stuff would work against that, but it would also be lot more expensive. But it does work, and luckily, the stuff on these shelves is not stuff have to get to really often, so it's no big deal. Let's try out the lights. It looks super cool in here. honestly don't know if the camera could even pick the lights up, but it looks pretty awesome. Of course, the entire point of doing all this was to hide the stuff on the shelves for my locked-in studio shot, so we gotta test that out. And here's the final shot. This is what it's gonna look like in our courses from now on, and will say it's actually pretty awesome because can see the light-up lines when didn't think that could. Now, of course, the lights and even the acrylic and the painting and all that stuff, that's me. That's like my aesthetic that want for this room. But if you just need something to cover up the kinda work utility shelves in your shop, this is great way to do it. Like mentioned before, these are shelves that lot of people have in different parts of their houses, and this is very simple project to make them just look better. It only uses few tools, some basic materials, and hope it gave you some ideas for something you could do in your home. And if it did, let me know down in the comments. Thanks for hanging out with me. I'll catch you next time.