Building 300cm bookshelf near ceiling, need heavy duty brackets for top of wall shelf

[Benjamin Kantor]

I am new to this forum and just wanted to get advice regarding the best way to install a bookshelf. I haven't purchased any materials yet, so I am completely open to various methods and different materials.

I have a roughly 300cm wall in my home office/guest room. Instead of putting a bookshelf on the floor, I would like to keep the room more spacious and just put up one really long shelf along the ceiling, about 30cm/12" down from the ceiling for my books.

There are wood/timber studs every 60cm, which means (including the corners) there are 6 studs in all: at 0cm, 60cm, 120cm, 180cm, 240cm, 300cm.

This bookshelf needs to hold a lot of weight (we are talking big academic books), and may need to be two separate 150cm shelves each (simply in terms of getting the wood into my house).

So I am thinking probably dimensions of 300cm x 26-30cm for the shelf, though it could be split into 2 pieces each of 150cm x 26-30cm if necessary. Given the weight of academic books, I'd imagine that the shelves need to be rated to hold around 100kg for the whole 300cm or 50kg for the 150cm shelf length.

Given the style of the room, I would like to do older rustic-looking wood shelf brackets, but I am guessing that might not hold the weight, so I am considering maybe some metal brackets and then somehow putting a purely decorative wood overlay over them subsequently.

I'm also open to floating shelves, but not sure how that is going to work with the weight issue. That would be ideal, though, if floating shelves would work.

In any case, as far as the basic design goes, what recommendations would people have for the shelf brackets and wood type for shelf? The weight is really the main issue here.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[JobAndKnock]

3 metres is longer than you will readily source man made board (standard sheet sizes is 8 x 4ft or 2440 x 1220mm, meaning a maximum length per piece of 2440mm), but you can readily source solid woods in lengths up to 3 metres.

In terms of carrying load 600mm centres of your joists does not make for high load carrying ability. If you want an idea about how much potential shelves will sag go and Google "Sagulator" and when you find it play around with materials, thicknesses support centres and loads to see how much your shelves will actually sag. Very useful piece of kit
.

 

[foxhole]

Any good?
https://www.loveskirting.co.uk/wind...i-chamfered-window-board-3-metre-x-25mm-p3620

 

[lynchnigel]

I've done something like this before, excuse the drawing, in solid pine.
You can fix solid ends to them as well.
So you have a solid back, then a shelf fixed through, with 2 X 1 underneath it. All the way along.
You can fix through the back and the 2 X 1 to the wall studs.
Then make timber brackets for them and fix through the shelf into them.

 

[lynchnigel]

Actually the shelf would ruin through and fixed upwards into the back.
Then the weight of the shelf would be taken up and trapped by the 2 X 1

 

[JP_]

I did this recently for my DVDs. 2.9m long shelf, used scaffolding brackets to hold it. I could have got a board the length, but got some melamine mdf boards cut to size (1.45m each)

https://www.diynot.com/diy/threads/ideas-for-putting-up-two-2-9m-dvd-shelves.556506/

I did not have the room for scaffold board thickness, but you could just get one.
These are the brackets
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Heavy-du...162875?hash=item3b247bc9fb:g:dTEAAOSwi7VcCYs-