How to put up shelving storage

Shelving storage can be a perfect accent in any room of your house, adding both beauty and functionality. The appropriate shelves can be used instead of upper cabinets in a kitchen, as book shelves in a family room or library or as pretty display space in a dining room. However, when you buy shelves like mobile shelving, metal shelving or any kind of cheap shelving or expensive racking, you will need to be able to put this shelving up.

Buy your shelving

The first thing to do if you want to put up metal racking or any kind of shelving is to purchase the shelves that you need to hang. When you go shopping for shelves, be sure that the kind that you buy is going to be substantial enough to support whatever you put on it. Shelves for garage, for example, may need to be able to handle more weight than shelves for a dining room since you may store tools in the garage but only much lighter weight dishes in the dining room.

Consider the mounting system

Some shelves stand on their own two feet, which is the easiest kind of shelf to put down. You can screw these types of shelves into the floor for maximum stability if you desire to do so. When shelves are wall mounted, things become a bit trickier. There are a few ways in which this can happen. There may be brackets which are screwed into the wall on which the shelf sits on top of. There may also be a mounting system which is screwed into the wall and which allows for the shelf to be moved up and down along the rack. This is common for closet shelving systems, like Rubbermaid.

Find the studs

Once you know what kind of mounting system your shelves have, you need to actually attach this system to the wall. To do this, you need to find the studs - the support beams in the wall. If you try to screw the shelves into drywall alone, they will not be supported and the screws can slip out. You can use a stud finder to find the studs.

Screw in your shelves

Use a screw driver or an electric drill to screw in the screws which attach the mounting brackets of your shelves. Mount your shelves to finish the job.