I want Record Shelving, something for my Lps and singles!

Ikea Expedit?

NOTE Ikea Expedit NOW UNAVAILABLE, AN EQUIVALENT WE ARE TOLD IS KALLAX – General opinion is that this new range will cope with records too. but i would personally excercise some caution.

I recently moved and needed to find storage for Lps, 12″ 10″ and 7″ singles that had been up in the Attic way too long.

I posted on a few forums and did some research, settling on the Ikea Expedit range as a possible answer to my storage woes; then I had my interest in the range confirmed by a number of people who like me are music obsessives. They too had either thought of purchasing or already had bought this shelving from Ikea for their collections.

Reasons to be cheerful?

Here are some reasons why this might work for you; 15″x15″ cubes (perfect for 12″ records), a 4×4 or 5×5 cube option, delivery of the flat packs by Ikea, a pretty easy build, which you could try on your own, but is better with two and a good look and finish.

Each cube is rated to take approximately 75Lps, though actually you could fit more in each 15″x15″ ‘hole’. Friends tell me that they have completely filled their shelves and the units have stayed solid over time, so you could, and I emphasise ‘could’ consider loading them up if your collection demands.

Putting them together is, pretty easy. At least I, and I’m not some drill toting DIY’er found it so.

They fix to the wall to prevent death and disaster and once they are, are very solid. Until that moment they like trying to to turn themselves into a parralellogram, so wall fixing is essential. Though they include what ammounts to a disclaimer in their instructions, they DO include brackets with your shelves’ ‘kit’.

They are not expensive and if you take the time to work out what they would cost you purely in materials let alone the time in design and construction, you’ll want to go for the buy it now option. Your wallet will probably agree as yet again Ikea sell lower than you could imagine and to boot they have a very nice finish quality for the money you’ll be paying.

Reasons to be tearful?

The delivery charge in the UK at £35 is a tad high I feel, considering the probablility that as large a corporation as Ikea most certainly is, they’d have other deliveries pretty close by and could ‘share’ those costs around a bit better.

When constructing mine, there were some minor defects. A small part of the lamination on a shelf had been dented and pushed up, most likely in manufacture; if I’d been really smart I could have hidden this by flipping the shelf and placing it the other way round, thus placing the ‘dent’ underneath and at the back of the shelf, unfortunately I didn’t. Doh!

Biggest Worry – Also and much more importantly, on one of the load bearing side panels some of the holes (3-4) prepared to receive the pegs from the shelving levels were not drilled properly and so the pegs move around within the holes designed to receive them; this means that they will not function properly in their load bearing capacity and if you are only shelving heavy vinyl records, this is most definately a concern.