I needed to hide all of my cables for my child and for an aesthetic reason, but I also wanted to have the possibility to plug my USB charger from the top of my desk. I wanted it to be cheap, sturdy enough to keep the shelves in place without sag in the middle and last but not least, to be modern and good looking.

I then found out by navigating on Pinterest this rack system, usually used in commercial shops because of its ability to be super modular: you can change position of the shelves whenever you want without getting mad. This system is easy to mount, clean and cheap.

This is the material I used:

• a sheet of 13 mm thickness OSB (19 euros)
• some pine scrapwood (0 euros)
• metal racks from my local home store (36 euros)

and these are the tools I used:

• table saw (not mandatory, you can use a circular saw or even a jigsaw)
• drill
• bubble level
• nail gun (not mandatory)
• wood glue

Unfortunately the 13 mm thickness wood wasn’t sturdy enough for the tons of books I had to organize, therefore I decided to double the thickness by making the shelves using a couple of layers. From a structural standpoint this choice worked out well but it turned out that the front edge was a little ugly because of the OSB I was using.. First I thought of using edge banding but I strongly believe that in most cases this material looks really cheap and worst than leaving the edge raw. I then decided to band the edges with a strip of pine cut to size. Actually I cut it a little over-sized and then trimmed using a flush trim bit with my router. The banding was glued and nailed with a nail gun and the holes filled with wood filler. This process not only make the hole project much nicer to look but added more strength to the shelves.

I then adopted the same process to make the table top but using this time longer shelves supports. Each of these supports can support a weight of around 60 kg. Still concerning the table top I leave here the link to the post where I describe how a made with my 3D printer the cable hole cover. Here is how it looks like:

I also made some 3D printed plastic trims in order to make look a little bit better the slots where the racks pass through the table top and here is the result and I have to say that I am pretty proud of it:

That’s all for now! Hope you’ll enjoy this project.

Stay tuned

Max