Expandable Storage Shelves

I needed to get our house organized and was talking to Jess' dad about storage so he shared a super simple design for modular shelves that he's been using for years. All you need are a bundle 1x4s and some 1/2" plywood.

These shelves are fantastic in a number of ways:

• Can be built with just a drill and any saw (circular saw, jig saw, table saw) and a drill
• Shelves can be disassembled, moved, and stored easily

The easiest build possible

The thing that makes these shelves quick to build is how easy they are.

The offcuts become the standoffs

A post is 72 inches cut from a 96-inch board, which leaves a two-foot tail. That tail chops into eleven 2-inch blocks, and those blocks are the standoffs every shelf rests on. The default build needs 48 of them and eight boards, so the tails alone cover every standoff with plenty left over.

The joint is just as plain. A standoff takes two countersunk screws into a post, the shelf sits on top of four standoffs and screws down into them, and that's the whole thing. Every screw drives straight and square, and the shelf's weight lands on the standoff's face grain rather than on anything you had to cut accurately.

Columns share their posts

The part I like most is what happens when you want it wider. A second column doesn't need four more posts, it needs two. The pair between two columns carries standoffs on both faces, so every column after the first costs two posts, a stack of offcut blocks, and some ply.

Customize and build it

The shopping list below is for the build you see, in the sizes the store actually sells. It comes from the same program as the model, so it can never fall out of date. Set your dimensions and both regenerate together.