FEATURED ARTICLE


by JEFFREY STALEY

I’ve mounted numerous prefab floating shelves for customers over the years. The few opportunities I’ve had to mount IKEA’s LACK shelves have opened up my eyes to several appealing realties. A few years ago, I mounted two LACK floating shelves in my bedroom and pushed them to their limits just so I could write this article, and well, there’s nothing lacking about them!

What aids the surprising strength of the LACK shelves—the 43-inch and 75-inch only (I dispiritingly fault the 11-inch variety below)—is a very subtle inclination of the mounting poles that extend from the wall bracket. Assuming your wall is plumb, what you’ll find post-installation is that the LACK shelf is NOT level front to back—it actually tilts upward. By the time you start weighting the shelf with sundries, the shelf will begin levelling out. This is ingenious! Other floating shelves I’ve mounted tend to be overly heavy as designers are hoping to overly push the aesthetic angle and thereby insist on using real wood. But because they don’t employ the counterweight system, once installed, these shelves sag at the outset, and this is true even if they include a similar mounting system. To clarify, such shelves, especially those with a “living edge,” look fantastic out of the box, but they will not sit perfectly level, will not even begin to perform as expected, meaning once a few objects are set upon them, they start to precariously tilt, and this usually is not without damage to the drywall. More curious still, given such an eventuality, their manufacturers supply low-quality plastic anchors, and sometimes the screws don’t feasibly pair with their plastic counterparts, not in terms of gauge, depth, nor head type. (Too many people behind their computers and too few in the field to appreciate several physics-based realities.) If you can get screws into studs, you’ll of course get better performance, but this is cloud dream as most installations have to square with existing furniture, fixtures, décor, etc., meaning far more times than not, you’re having to play the anchor game.

Another aspect to appreciate is that LACK floating shelves give users a good deal of surface area without the weight, a truth played out in all three offered sizes. This is very important given that those desperately-handsome wood block shelves supplied by other manufacturers can’t even go a few pounds without the crumpling declension (discussed above). As such, given their weight-to-surface area ratio, the competition can’t proudly jut from the wall like LACK shelves do. In other words, you’ve got this incredible looking shelf that isn’t really functional. LACK offers the best of both worlds: greater surface area and ability to deck the shelf generously—a game-winning paradox. Every LACK shelf juts 10.25 inches from the wall (a laudable measure). How do they pull it off apart from the upward-armed bracket? Well, IKEA, always wise to reducing shipping costs and honoring consumer budgets, maximizes surface area AND weight capacity by employing a cardboard honeycomb interior, so yes you could easily break the shelf over your knee, but the shelf’s own weight will hardly put a strain on the wall bracket, meaning you’re free to load the shelf well beyond what intuition would suggest. This simply means greater utility at the end of the day. I don’t have any hard numbers, but I’ve filled one 43” shelf left to right with trade-size paperbacks, and though it’s a pitching a degree or two downward, I’m amazed that so little holds so much up! What’s more, the veneers are real wood, so you can’t say LACK shelves are cheaply made unless you’re hoping to stop a robbery. I have also mounted cheap plastic shelves painted or dyed to mimic natural wood, which, being appreciably lightweight and therefore not playing the fool’s game, still can’t hold a candle to the LACK shelves as they can crack and bend under relatively light strains, and this apart from feeling and looking garish.

Typically, the rule for most any type of shelving mounted on drywall is to get a least one screw or fastener into a stud. This means you’re sometimes at the mercy of your studs, especially if you’re planning to go heavy, i.e. books, ceramic/porcelain figurines, potted plants, etc. But as the IKEA’s metal wall bracket has several holes, forgivingly ovular, you can get away the exclusive use of drywall anchors so long as you support the strap/bracket in at least five different positions. The directions make clear which of the holes you should be exploiting (see picture), but if other holes avail you to stud positions, then you certainly can and should ignore the suggested five-hole pattern. According to their specifications, if you can mount into studs—I take this to mean at least two screws of the five suggested screws make their way into studs, you can effectively triple the weight capacity of the shelf, from 11 pounds to 33 pounds (as per IKEA). You have to use drywall anchors no matter what as the wall bracket must sit flat to the wall across its entire length, and not just at the pickups the two studs offer. Can you weight LACK shelves beyond 33 pounds? Depends. The reality is that you’ll end up somewhere between these two numbers as you might only get into one stud.

But what happens if you get into two studs and anchor well beyond the suggested pattern, fasten at more than five points? In other words, can you exceed 33 pounds? Let’s investigate. The bracket on the 75-inch shelf features 18 holes, so clearly the more points at which you fasten the mounting bracket, the stronger the shelf, the greater its weight capacity. I mounted a 75-incher in the same room as the 43, and I did get into two studs and added three anchors, but this shelf began to tilt well beyond level as I loaded it with books (the 75 of course heavier than the 43). Even though I had dutifully engaged the expansion anchors, they simply began to slip. What was the solution? I switched them out with toggle anchors, also known as butterfly anchors. This type of fastening knows no slippage. So where are we? If you can fasten the LACK’s wall bracket effectively, meaning getting into studs at two points and then using toggle/butterfly anchors at three or more non-stud positions, I believe you can exceed the listed weight limitations for the product. Of course there is a learning curve, not just for pre-drilling but even for setting and tightening the anchors themselves, but this is knowledge that will payoff of in the course of other installations and so is undeniably worth the time/discovery investment.

And here goes my aforementioned reservation. The smallest LACK shelf, almost a square with a length of 11.75”W against the 10.25” standard depth, regrettably uses a different mounting system, meaning there is no mounting bracket with poles at all, but simply two teardrop holes that you slot over two pan head screws driven into drywall. As IKEA provides no mounting screws, you have to be quite selective as to the size of the screw head (I’m not referring to its gauge), but even if you’re on point, the stage is set for the same problem addressed in the second paragraph: out the door, the shelves are failing to hold the line. Not only that, you pretty much have to measure to the 32nd of an inch just to get the shelf to snug, and once you do get the screw depth correct, you’ll have to scrape the drywall surface just to get the shelf in place. And this is after you’ve perfect spaced the screws to match the spread of the keyholes (again to the 32nd of an inch). With the poled mounting bracket—included with the 43” and 75” shelves—you can simply use a torpedo level to square and then a pencil to mark holes. And just to add insult to injury, the expansion anchors you will likely fail as you’re having to set the screw head so far from the anchor you’d set, the anchor itself will not sufficiently expand and therefore will begin losing its grip once items are added to the shelf. Your only recourse is buy longer pan head screws, but then what’s true, longer screws typically have larger heads, and now you can’t even come close to slotting the keyholes over the screws. Oh well!

A rescuing point that can’t be lost is that LACK shelving allows users to mix and match shelf lengths as each offering lists the same height and depth. What’s more, there are, as of this writing, five different finishes, and so, from a compositional perspective, the door is open to some fairly awesome display opportunities, especially if you’re ceilings aren’t capped at eight feet. The learning curve is a little steep, but once you’ve shouldered it, you’ll be amazed at how much you can transform your living space for so little.