Shelving considerations

I decided to put modular shelving up along two of my office walls using those metal strips you attach to the wall and add shelf brackets to. It's what I've been using since our first house in 2004, and it allows me to put the figures out in a continuous, unbroken line from one side of the room to the other. I think it's better than having multiple bookshelves, where the shelves are interrupted every few feet by the side of the bookshelf itself. It does remove a bit of the configurability, since the entire shelf has to sit at the same height, while bookshelves can be staggered to fit the figures more easily. I just prefer seeing the characters side-by-side, and it lets me cram more figures onto the available horizontal surface.

So, I have the main supports up on the walls, and I have the shelving boards in the garage, ready to be cut and spliced together. What I don't have a the moment are the brackets to hold the shelves themselves. The boards I have are just under 12 inches in depth. So, I picked up some 12 inch brackets, thinking they'd work fine. Turns out, having close to an inch of bracket sticking out from under the shelves every few feet just doesn't look all that good:



So, I think I'll go back to the eight inch brackets. The only problem there is, I can't find eight inch brackets locally that don't have that little notch on the very end. It's meant to be there to keep the shelf from sliding forward and backward, but when the bracket is eight inches and the board is 11 inches, that just doesn't work. I would either have to drill holes in the bottom of the shelves for each bracket, or cut off the notches on over 40 pieces of metal... I did the cutting option back in our first house, but I didn't have the sheer number I have now. So, today my plan is to do some searching on the web to see if I can find some eight inch brackets without the notch. Exciting, I know.

Meanwhile, my collection keeps growing. Yesterday the Leader class movie Starscream, Deluxe Sea Spray, and PCC Skyburst arrived from Toys R Us online. Sea Spray and 'Screamer may just have to remain boxed until I have time to get to them...