In February, I decided to change the layout of the room at home that doubles as my home office and home studio. It was a good decision. Now I just have to work through the consequences.
There isn’t the same amount of space for my amps as there was before. I needed new furniture to put them on. In a world of metric measurements and largely imported furniture, amps and their dinosaur imperial measurements are a very awkward fit. I wasn’t able to find anything in the shops that would suit.
This one’s a bit of a long read, as much about the story as step-by-step instructions. If you’re interested in making your own, I hope you find it useful!
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The Hermit’s Cave – my little home studio – is just a spare bedroom in our little terraced house. It’s not a big room; I don’t think I could fit a king-size double bed in here if I tried.
In February, I decided that the room wasn’t working for me any more. I went out, bought two new desks for the home office, and just piled my amps and cabs up against the remaining spare wall in the room while I figured out what to do with them.
Amps and cabs are funny things. It’s not just the technology in them that’s obsolete. Their dimensions are measured in an obsolete way too (inches).
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On top of that, even though many amps look boxy, they’re actually quite awkward sizes. Many of them have controls on the top and round the back that I need access to. Those useful carry handles on top also add a deceptive amount of height to them.
I spent several weeks looking into it, but I just couldn’t find any ready-made furniture that would do the job. There was just too big a difference between the dimensions of my amps and the dimensions of the furniture in the shops. If I’d gone down that road, there would have been a lot of empty space, and I would have had to get rid of some of my gear.
Did I take a serious look at having someone make the furniture for me? In all honesty, not really. Truly bespoke furniture comes with a price tag to match. I just didn’t want the furniture to end up costing more than my amps have.
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Of my existing gear into a reduced space. Everything needed a home, and (somehow) that home had to fit in the room. I didn’t want to have to get rid of anything, but there was no way that I could make more space. I had to make the best use of the space that was available.
I put all the dimensions into a spreadsheet: width across, height and depth front-to-back of each amp. From that, two patterns emerged:
Looking back at it, I didn’t get the width measurements of all of the amps right. They’ve all got rounded edges, and in a couple of cases I ended up noting down shorter widths than I should have done.
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I got away with it, but by luck, not judgement. I went with shelves that were 62 cm wide. If they’d been 65 cm wide, everything would have fit.
If you decide to do a similar build for yourself, I’d recommend going with either 70 cm or 75 cm wide shelves if you can.
This was the hardest part of all. Right from the beginning, I knew roughly what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to make it. So I did what everyone does these days, and turned to YouTube for ideas.
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I knew that I wanted two sets of wooden shelving: one vertical stack to go in the corner next to my studio rack, and two longer benches to go along the remaining wall in the room.
I also knew that I was going to have to use what’s called British Standard Pipe (BSP). You might know it as black piping, or industrial piping. It comes in 1/2″ or 3/4″ widths, and in varying heights.
Why use BSP? I didn’t have the wood-working skills to design and build this shelving using only wood. I also didn’t have any wood-working tools, and didn’t want to inflate the cost of this project by buying more than I had to.
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By using BSP for the vertical supports, I’d only need to use wood for the actual horizontal shelves themselves. It was a good decision.
What I couldn’t work out from YouTube alone was how to connect the BSP to the shelves. Oddly enough, it’s an area that most videos (and most articles on the subject) gloss over at best.
There was a time when local DIY stores sold decent pieces of wood. That doesn’t seem to be the case any more. These days, the only place to get wood seems to be timber merchants. Unfortunately, most of the ones around me only sell to the trade.
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That got me thinking: what about using recycled wood instead? We’ve got excellent recycling here in Wales, and a lot of the wood being thrown out is old wood from old furniture – the really good stuff. Where does it all go?
I found a place down by the river in Newport called Reseiclo that specialises in reclaiming old wood. What a find! We headed down there in the car, and came back with all the wood that I needed for the project:
On the day, they had lots of old scaffold boards in, so that’s what I brought back. I ended up with 12 lots of board cut to 62cm in length, and 4 boards cut to 1m in length.
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The scaffold boards worked out really well. They weren’t what I went looking for, but honestly, I think I’d have to order bespoke cuts of hardwood to do substantially better.
I found a place in Kent called Threaded Pipe that sells British Standard Pipe and the associated fittings for it. The main reason I went with them wasn’t price. They’ll happily cut the pipe to size (in 5cm increments) and then thread both ends of it for you. That saved me a world of hassle.
Looking back at it, I probably could have saved money by going with 1/2″ piping instead of the 3/4″ piping. I wasn’t sure which thickness I needed, so I decided to play it safe. That said, I really like how the 3/4″ piping looks, so I’ve no regrets there.
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I didn’t end up using everything I ordered. 8 of the flanges – and those 115cm lengths of piping – were for a third shelf that was going to sit above my studio rack. It was a nice idea in my head, and an utterly rubbish idea in practice.
The British Standard Piping was the single biggest expense of the project. I definitely cut corners elsewhere on the project as a result.
My original plan was to get the recycled wood cut, planed and sanded down at Reseiclo. Unfortunately, on the day we went down there, most of their machinery was out of use, so they were only able to cut the wood for me.
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I went out and bought a workbench to work on, an orbital sander to help me dress and shape the wood, and several sets of sandpaper pads for the sander.
My local DIY store only had two models of workbench to choose from. I went with the classic Black and Decker workbench, mostly because the store’s own-brand workbench just wasn’t on display. I don’t like buying things sight-unseen.
The orbital sander was an own-brand model from the same local DIY store. I did a bit of research first, and the general consensus seems to be that it’s fine for occasional use, but it won’t last if you use it regularly.
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This is an area where buying nothing wasn’t an option, and now I’ve got some tools for the next (first!) time I do some DIY around the house.
A good friend of ours lent us a few tools to help me out. He lent us a pillar drill stand, long drill bits, and a tool for marking where to drill on wood.
I ended up using two different lengths of wood screw for the shelves. I used about a dozen (roughly) 4″ wood screws to stabilise the wood (more on that below), and a couple of hundred short (roughly 1″) wood screws to screw the BSP flanges into each shelf.
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I also used another 128 of the short wood screws to help me fasten the boards together to make 8 individual shelves, along with 32 “flat wrap” steel plates that weren’t part of the original plan. I had to get the flat wrap steel plates during the pandemic lockdown.
I have a childhood memory of amber wooden boards. I’ve no idea where it’s from, but for some reason, it’s an image that’s really stuck in my head, and it’s the look that I wanted for this project.
I went with a matt finish because I didn’t want the shelves to reflect light on camera. Rightly or wrongly, I was worried that a gloss finish wouldn’t look as good in photos or in
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