During this week’s furlough, I decided to tackle a few projects around the house that I’ve been putting off for far too long. One of those projects involved creating a pair of “spacer shelves” for our upstairs entertainment center.

The built-in entertainment in our upstairs den is really nice, but the shelves are way too tall. Take a look at the shelves to the right of the television in the (terrible) picture above. Each shelf is almost 18″ apart; probably great for displaying photographs or trophies, but terrible for things like DVDs.

Here you can see some of my Blu-ray movies. Above them there’s almost 11″ of space, easily enough for an entire row of movies.

Fortunately, the home builder left a few leftover pieces of wood out in the garage. Some of them are an exact match for this entertainment center and the rest are pretty close, but all of them will work.

The first thing I did was measure the height of a DVD case. It’s about 7 1/2″ tall, so I figured with a shelf that’s 8″ tall, I could easily convert one of these cubbies into two.

Supplies required: tape measure, pencil, t-square, saw.

The inside of each cubbie is 26″ wide, and the pieces of wood left behind in the garage are 48″ long. With two 8″ blocks for support and one 26″ shelf, that left me 6″ to spare. Perfect!

This literally took less than five minutes, and that’s with getting all the cobwebs and spider eggs off the wood.

Back upstairs, I inserted one of the 8″ blocks on each side of the cubby hole, and placed the 26″ shelf on top of the blocks. I didn’t use any screws because there’s literally no place for any of the pieces to go. You could either push the blocks all the way to the back or pull them all the way forward. I thought everything looked better flush with the front, so that’s what I did.

After I was sure everything fit, I went back to the garage, cut a second pair, and placed them on the shelf above that.

With the additional spacer shelves in place, I was able to fit all our disc-based video games along with all my Blu-ray movies (I don’t have very many) on the shelves without having to stack them horizontally. Success!

Because it worked so well, I decided to do the same thing to the other side.

One unexpected benefit of these shelves is, because they don’t go all the way to the back, there’s a lot of space for things like cables and power supplies.

I have been meaning to build these cheater spacer shelves for several years now. From start to finish, including taking everything off the shelves and putting them back in place, it took less than an hour!