record storage

i kinda like it!

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/home_blog/2009/11/the-deal-atocha-design-record-cabinets-on-sale-through-nov-8.html

i don't like the price tag though

at first i was like "but i like looking at the spines" but it actually would make browsing pretty easy - just like flipping through milk crates only it looks 100x nicer

not sure i like the veneer, concept is sweet though.

so far the ideal storage i've found is at ikea w/the expedit monster shelves, but they're so ubiquitous that i feel like there could be something better out there. at the same time, they're really sturdy and not bad-looking and the price is right.

lol yea i have expedit

i've found that it's actually pretty hard to find decent looking bookshelves 1.) that will actually fit an LP and 2.) won't sag in the middle from too much weight

i *wish* there could be something better out there, i should say.

i'm afraid if i get more records i'll just end up getting another expedit.

for years i've said to myself that i'm just gonna build my own but after a recent move i just caved about bought expedit. records were on the floor lined up against the wall previously

about should be "and"

The cabinet shown above, normally $5,500, is now $4,675

but that's, like, record money.

love my expedit, cant imagine what else id want, except maybe some better 7" storage

i used to have an expedit, but moved into a place w/room under the staircase that it wouldn't fit in anymore, so had this company (http://www.stumasa.com) build me something. i think it only cost like 250

http://robotsinheat.com/images/stacks.jpg

that looks dope jaxon

thing is even if you move and that doesn't go under a staircase again it would still look really cool as a piece of furniture

hopefully i'll not pile so much shit on it (it is actually way cleaner than that now)

that guy who sold the $500,000 worth of blue note LPs could buy a few of these atocha

haha!

I bought a giant 8' x 5' maple bookshelf from a bookstore that was closing, then I found another one with modular shelves when I was cleaning out a rental for work. with the two of them I have just enough room.

shelf 1:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2460/3623986396_3c3f599db0_m.jpg

shelf 2:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2439/3623987614_2d39e4f339_m.jpg

the key is to get real wood shelves, not particleboard. to buy such things new is very expensive, and to find them used is very hard. i have one big real wood bookshelf (80" tall, 12" deep, etc) that i've held on to through a dozen moves.

although i should add that i think i have fewer records than most of you ("only" about 750)

this expedit wall cost this person a little more than a thousand bucks. you can't really beat that when it comes to shelving:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iEBOtFK4-H0/Rm7XvfHythI/AAAAAAAAADY/OfQUcfkRIi8/s1600/Boekenkast_EvaMarie_001.jpg

What are the typical complaints leveled against particleboard?

Scott, is that yours? Beautiful.

particleboard will bend under weight, also very susceptible to moisture (xp)

i have four of these filled with records at home. the smaller ones:

http://knockoffs.olya.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/rollingstorage_ikea_shelves.jpg

no, that's not my wall of books.

for the bigger ikea shelves i would recommend attaching them to the wall. they can wobble. and records are heavy. i had two of the big monster ones. one is in the store now and one got wrecked during our move. i'm going to paint paintings on the boards that i salvaged from the busted one. was thinking of doing a swedish death metal series on ikea board.

yeah those are a little wobbly and nearly impossible to put together in a fashion that results in them being wobble-free, as far as i can tell. i bank on the weight of 1200 records to keep them in line.

sang froid has to post the picture of his record room again. soooooooo pretty.

ya here me, sang!?

only three cubbies of records in that whole wall????

maybe they have another wall of records. maybe those three shelves near the turntable are just the "gonna play next" records.

gonna play all at once

I have a 4x4 Expedit with a 2x4 sitting on top. I intended to bolt one or both to the wall but of course never got around to it. I think I'm hoping to move before the next earthquake.
Also the records really do eliminate wobble. It *feels* solid as a rock when loaded up. And when I perform my try-to-rock-the-shelf stress test, I can't really get it to budge.
I'm living on the edge, I know.

I have a bunch of more solid, wood-toned, 1x2 square units that I've got stacked under my stereo to form a 2x4. They're really nice and more flexible than the Ikea option, but I don't think they're still manufactured. Maybe I'll post a picture after I get home.

i bolted mine, somewhat for the sake of the glasstop coffeetable

can anyone identify any records in that big-shelf pic? i see bruce springsteen's NEBRASKA...

lol I finally made it to Ikea on Monday and got an Expedit for a basement vault. These were all in boxes around the house, most from the magic dumpster of records that appeared one day this summer.

http://i637.photobucket.com/albums/uu92/damien_stone/expedit.jpg

i don't actually have that many records (maybe ~250) so i got the 1x5 expedit tower. the ~700 cds though went in ikea's billy bookshelf, which was great b/c you can buy extra shelves and fit a really pretty high # of cds

These were all in boxes around the house, most from the magic dumpster of records that appeared one day this summer.

Have you mentioned this before? if so, we need a link..... if not, the whole story.....

hmmm, i think we talked about it on a couple of threads. i should find where, because i'd like to find the actual date of magic dumpster day and celebrate it every year with a feast and song. and of course a dramatic re-telling of the events of that day.

it's on the I Love Vinyl! Recent Haul/Score/Purchase Thread (2009)

7/22/09 never forget. we should meet at the site and leave records in tribute. you could clean out the crap that piles up at the store.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ja3NxeLhWg&feature=player_embedded#!

I really like these but they are pretty expensive to ship. I haven't been able to find a US equivalent.

http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/pikaiti-kagu/item/5-580/

http://i.imgur.com/YcmIjpv.jpg

possibly hopeless query: a few years ago a friend hooked me up with six stackable LP storage boxes from her mom's garage. one assumes they are from the 70s or maybe early 80s. they are white, some form of wood product, 13.5" by 13.5" by 13.5". each is divided into six compartments by five thin vertical dividers, which are set back a half-inch from the front. this reduces the capacity of each cube, but keeps the records nice and vertical imo. at the center of the top of each one is a little peg sticking out, and at the center of the bottom of each one is a little hole. very very easy to slide into place and stack up when moving. there are no identifying manufacturers' marks or product names; do any of y'all verterans out there recognize this ungoogleable product?? i would buy more of these if they could be found by name.

seen at the left sides of these two images:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4391/36199484254_5e683a9e6f_c.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4376/37034662125_604de38fc4_c.jpg

i really like how little wasted space they generate, aside from the width lost to the dividers - there's no real estate thrown away to chunky back or front zones i don't need, as you can see happening with the IKEA shelves below the white boxes. those inches count for a lot in a brooklyn bedroom. also i think the dividers help my screwy record psychology, creating mental "sections" and also helping me to "see" parts of the collection that my eyes might otherwise pass over. anyway my collection is at the point where i have to add shelving, punt a bunch of stuff, or stop buying records, and clearly the answer is shelving.

i don't have any useful info but i am interested in your thoughts on the Spin Clean

nice cat picture doc!

those are really nice dr c.

i got a friend of mine to custom build me a media cabinet/record cabinet and matching wall cabinet out of birch ply and i have probably never been happier with a piece of furniture in my life. i think i paid £1600 all in. i'll dig out pix tonight. it's got drawers for cables, a niche that exactly fits my speaker, etc.

aw thanks! re: the spinclean: i thought i'd posted about it to a vinyl cleaning thread but actually it was in Shady scams and other silly business ideas to take advantage of earnest new vinyl collectors where i got sold on the thing.

anyway... love it, hooked, ended up obsessively cleaning every record i own with it. it's definitely a task and a pain and you have to set aside time for it but that can be good listening time, to get into the groove. often times it makes no real difference to the sound but when it does it's like windexing a grimy window, suddenly this crappy old record sounds amazing. definitely buy the one that comes with extra drying cloths cause you'll need them and buying the dinky-sized extra-cloth packs separately was a bummer.

also be aware that once you're hooked it will sort of screw up your buying/listening habits - i don't want to put anything dirty on the table so now i end up saving up little batches of new acquisitions to wash before i listen to anything! kinda silly, might just be my problem.

You can get a big pack of no lint microfiber cloths from Amazon, or an auto supply place for cheap. Folks use them for drying cars.

If you reuse, don't wash them with other clothes because they'll pick up lint from the laundry and will deposit the funk on yr records.

Thanks!

I'm using IKEA Bosnäs ottomans for storage. They're ventilated, dust-free, washable, stackable, easy to carry, and you can sit on them.

in Denmark we call those types of shelves "bogkasser" - it means book boxes, and it's a great google image search term

here's an example of a newly manufactured version of the bogkasse known as Kubik https://www.traevarer.dk/kubik-trae-hel-reolkasse-6-rum

dunno if you'll find an American retailer though...

I have about 10 of those at home, they're tops for record storage, and books too!

oh yeah btw "bogkasse" is the singular term, may be an even better google search term

not being able to solve this is maddening. just some simple, well-built and sturdy stackable cubes, 13.5" on every side. you'd think the market would be flooded with such things but everybody wants to sell you some funky designer thing that holds 25 LPs total, or some cheap bullshit that will obviously fall apart, or more IKEA stuff that's way oversized for the job at hand. am i gonna need to design this shit myself and walk to the lumberyard and figure out how to glue pieces of wood together with square joints and shit?

these are really appealing esp. since you can get optional feet (which'd be cool for the bottom tier). but yikes at $99 per cube plus bulky shipping. i dig supporting hand craft at reasonable rates but not sure my storage problem is worth $600+ at the moment. wish you could minus the doors which i would never use.

this is the perfect record shelf imo, 700 DKK is ~120 USD:
https://www.traevarer.dk/kubik-trae-hel-reolkasse-6-rum

you can write them via this formula to ask about shipping costs:
https://www.traevarer.dk/kontakt

but maybe you can also just ask you local carpenter to build one, it's not a complex construction (or maybe go on a FB DIY page and ask for any takers to build it and what's a fair price)

hmmm, the getting-someone-to-build-some angle is appealing tbh. i'd be willing to shell out extra cash for getting 'em juuuust right without having to get all frustrated fucking around with wood and stuff and end up doing a crappy job myself.

you don't really want a cube because they're too heavy to lift. You can get stackable boxes either in a really tough cardboard or plastic from Bags Unlimited. They have two gauges of cardboard and I've tried both. The lighter cardboard can be taped up with packing tape when the boxes get old - I haven't had to throw out a box yet and I reinforced some boxes with paint stirrers on the long sides. The heavier cardboard, unfortunately, still uses the lighter cardboard lids.

I've seen the plastic boxes, too, and they're very tough.

Anyway, buy 25 at a time and they're pretty affordable. They hold about 60 records each. You can stack them 5 high, but the company recommends stacking them 3 high (I usually do 4). I write roughly what I've put in the boxes on the outside.

I want a cube. I have a cube. I have 9 of these 70x70cm shelves. They are awesome. You can stack them. You can hang fill them with records and hang them on your wall. They are an all time success in Danish design. They are made from wood.

You can move the inner shelves around too, use them for cds, books, whatever, put in drawers. Great stuff.

Actually I bought 16 of them, got a great deal, less than 200 euros, used lot, but gave away/sold some cause I didn't have room for them. Anyway, I'll stop now.

i do want a cube; i like the cubes i have that i was recently posting about. they're super liftable and when i move house i don't need to transfer the records into something else to do it. but i guess potentially the heavier-duty ones with the thick birch plywood wouldn't be so good. tbh at this stage i'm not really interested in anything that needs taping up or paint stirrers. definitely no cardboard or plastic - but i'm glad that system works for you, it's good to know it's out there!

if you win the lottery Danish brand Montana has a 6 times more expensive version of the shelves I linked to above:
https://www.danishdesignstore.com/collections/shop-by-manufacturer-montana-mobler/products/lassen-show-wall-shelving-module-montana-mobler

i don't have a lot of records with me here but i will need to transport ~30 records to another country...is bringing them as a carry on on an airplane okay?

should be, I've probably carried that many in a bag on a plane before.

cool
thank you

Doc, some cubes here: Olympia Record Crates. Seem a little spendy to me, but look nice.

Aw, those do look nice! Spendy indeed, but pleasantly minimal. Hmmmmm.

My friend's husband recently plunked down for a bunch of MapleShade stuff, which seems classily-designed - like, there are modules for other formats that don't look awkward as hell with the LPs. The basic 150-LP module in finished oak is $100 ($85 if you buy four or more) but that's without bottom and top flat pieces. Man...looks good though.

Unfinished oak at $80 each with bottoms, plus $40 for a little base at the floor. Man... now that's tempting.

https://images.homedepot-static.com/productImages/efd857b4-f3a7-4bdd-b604-c861f0348b6d/svn/natural-way-basics-media-storage-wb-2lp-nl-44_1000.jpg

these things are made of "zboard" which seems like paper?
but i love the staging: rusty stereo, landline phone, film camera, and a boat. i think one of those books is upside down, too.

by 'love' do you mean 'hate'?

multiple copies of the same lps too.

i want to hate it but they've captured my lifestyle perfectly!

jk i do mean hate.

Am in the midst of a tedious deep-cleaning process following the fire in my apartment that some of you have heard about. Thankfully, my records did not get any water damage, and, being packed deep into those beautiful white cubes with the little dividers, were exposed to smoke only on the spines and tops of the outer sleeves. This is still proving to be an absolute tedious nightmare to clean up and deoderize, and many will be forever discolored but hey - I still have my music.

The upshot for this thread is that in the process of taking everything out of the white cubes for cleaning, I finally noticed a little sticker label identifying the damn things! niels was right to point me to northern Europe - they're Finnish, from the Palaset line made by Treston from around 1972. They're not, as I believed, a Masonite-like wood product, but a very dense plastic that feels like it. This website has a little background, and a brochure that suggests that my cubes are the K-05 model; flipped on their side, they could accept little drawers! Unfortunately, they're not quite the ubiquitous bargain find one might hope; here's a motley lot of sixteen cubes that went for $1,116.

Borrowing from niels, I searched "palaset bogkasser" and immediately found a pleasing period ad. What a font!

https://i.pinimg.com/474x/dd/0a/1c/dd0a1cda094c4ec6f5ab0bdbbda3ca3b--cubes.jpg

Haha, that's a beautiful font indeed.

Glad to hear you solved the mystery, if not the problem at hand. Sorry to hear about the fire, hope you're OK.

thanks, niels. it was a pretty hard blow at the time and it's been a very weird couple of months. settling into a new place, and the process of cleaning and deodorizing the stuff i could salvage is now, if not quite near the end, at a point where i can conceive of it being over at some point. all things considered it could have been worse. we did, however, lose our cat, the one pictured upthread in my first images of the storage cubes. so that's pretty much shitty. but it's getting easier to just remember the good times, etc.

I'm sorry for your loss, that's a beautiful cat.

Maybe the Palaset solution doesn't have to be so expensive, this lot went for 200 USD a few years ago https://www.lauritz.com/da/auktion/ristomatti-ratia-reolsystem-palaset-15/i3727324/

If you ever come to Denmark, I'll hook you up with some Danish "bogkasser"...

Thanks, niels.

looked up the ones mizzell posted upthread, with the hilarious staging. you can read more here but the kicker is: "Maximum load 30 lbs (recommended)." That would explain the rather thinly-populated collections seen in the photos, but it does make it sort of hard to grok them as "Vinyl Record Storage Cubes."

We’ve been rocking the face-out look on our record shelves for some years (it makes the wall much more interesting) but we never thought to go red / green festive for Xmas before.

Don’t know why @halfpintpress only just thought to do this this Christmas. It looks gooood. pic.twitter.com/ouUG5nxhde

— Jenn Phillips-Bacher (@MrsAudiac) December 19, 2018

love this set-up that paul has

https://i.imgur.com/ltCnLGr.png

wondering how people would store their records if money and space weren't an issue. i feel like these days i daydream more about perfect shelving than i do about rare records.

wow, my 13-year-old Flickr photos are still upthread

I am very very happy with my shelving situation, I have the two shown above and one I built myself.

I need a better solve for my 45s, but the cliche ikea shelves have been way more satisfying than my mid century furniture solution especially now that my collection is way too big.

I got a nice color/texture for the ikea shelves too, so that helps but I started to panic that the heavyass vinyl was going to start ruining the midcentury stuff it was jammed in, so switching years ago to the ikea was a huge relief.

I also ended up building wooden 45 boxes by hand, you can see them in one of the photos above

i'm still keeping the fire burning on Flickr. as much as successive administrations have screwed up the site, nothing else does the job.

love Paul's setup. if money and space weren't an issue, i'd want something along those lines... i've been thinking lately about wanting everything more or less at eye level. not sure i need the two adjacent turntables though, and perhaps more underneath the the next bays of countertop...

my ikea cube storage is okay but has gotten dinged over the years and significantly less sturdy, so a bit wobbly. probably due to 5 or 6 moves in addition to the burden of holding all those heavy records.

i think i need a better media storage solution generally, maybe a bit like what scott seward posted back in '09, although not quite as extensive.

i was asking a woodworker friend about real-wood solutions and the price he quoted me for a pretty basic solution was just insane to me. i guess custom wood furniture has always been for wealthy people.

A friend built a 45 drawer set for my store; it works so well I want one for my own 45s. Half-assed pics here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/ClWK6EeLVNq/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

I think the materials were like 2 sheets of plywood plus 3 sets of drawer sliders.

other than building my own shelving out of old recycled timber i've had luck converting old furniture into lp receptacles. last one was a 1 metre long set of drawers where all i had to do was knock out the piece of wood between the two bottom drawers, add some structural support and it ended up being a perfect fit (also left me with a handy drawer at the top!)

It's pretty hard to beat the ikea shelves. I've added masonite backings to mine to make them sturdier and to keep the records from shifting back too far. With the backing on I'm comfortable stacking them. I have several sets of the 2x4 units stacked three high.

I forgot to mention these insane shelves that a carpenter friend just recently built for my dead friend's record collection, which I have temporarily inherited. Check it out, they are done mortise-and-tenon style, with no nails or screws. Salvaged white pine.

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ah265/DJsleeve/IMG_1298.jpg?width=320&height=320&fit=bounds
https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ah265/DJsleeve/IMG_1299.jpg?width=320&height=320&fit=bounds

whoops

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ah265/DJsleeve/IMG_1299.jpg?width=320&height=320&fit=bounds

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ah265/DJsleeve/IMG_1298.jpg?width=320&height=320&fit=bounds

I use these cubes.

They can be ordered with feet and indents on the top for the feet, or just plain. The idea here is you can buy them as you need them, and stack/orient them as space and needs allow. One cube, 20 cubes- no problem.

They're much nicer than the "birch effect" stuff from Ikea, and you can add optional cat-proofing doors made of plexi... I have the doors in clear, orange and blue, and they look really nice together.

There are a few downsides to know about:

Cost, not so cheap. They ship assembled so the shipping is also high. But any "better than Ikea" record storage solution is pricy. And how much did those 80 LPs inside cost you? I've gotten a few from their "Scratch and Dent" sale and they're barely scratched and/or dented, especially if they're one of the inside cubes in a block of them.

Tolerances. These are not, IMO, extremely precisely made. The feet and indentations and probably overall measurements can be +/- a tiny bit, and when you stack them these differences are apparent. So in my particular case, a stack of 3 cubes might be up to 1/8" higher than the stack next to it. And since my stereo stuff is on top of this shelving, and my turntable is wider than one cube, it sits across two cubes at some tiny angle rather than completely flat. Maybe this is stuff for nerds and you don't care. Also living in old ass apartments in big cities, the walls and floors aren't exactly precisely flat either. Bottom line, it's not as clean as one shelving unit. (Upside, it's reconfigurable and able to be bought as you go).

Doors. The doors are a great idea but sometimes they pop out and they have sharp edges. I've gotten some painful cuts from these plexi edges.

All in all I still highly recommend these. I get a lot of compliments on them!

i don't want to be a hater. they do look nice. and it's good when people share their vinyl storage solutions.

but that just seems like an insane price to me.

i can't really think about this topic without feeling profound distress that i can't afford to have anything nice. idk. it's not like i like my ikea shelves

I love my Ikea record shelves. It's something they do right that's fairly durable.

Holy shit, one of those cubes is $190 + shipping, and they're wonky?

I feel like they raised the price over the last 10 years, when I got my first couple. I don't mean incredibly wonky. But when one buys say, a table, they expect the tabletop to be flat right? Maybe my expectations are too high.

Not sure what shipping cost is for 16 cubes but even if it is not that bad it seems like this would cost at least $3500 to replace my particular set up. Plus I forget what it is called but I got a pretty nice faux wood finish color of my ikea piece! It’s not the standard birch... anyway, I’m also happy with mine!

https://ibb.co/85c9FMx

That's my setup. I don't know how to directly link images, apparently. I have another set that you can see intruding into the corner, but they have tchotchkes and art books on them.

I put masonite panels on the backs of all of them to make them sturdier and so the records don't poke out the back, also to cut down on dust. The little bins up top with white cloths on them hold my 45's.

i love that color orange on you

Thanks! That used to be my favorite shirt, shorts and chair.

BrickBox makes a modular cubes similar to what majorairbro posted. Seem to be non-wonky, and cheaper (though still beyond what I'm willing to spend). I think they look great:

https://www.modmobili.com/

(they're Spanish-made, but the link is for the US distributor)

I got two 3x2 units from Target. they were about $100 apiece and look pretty nice. you can then go to Home Depot and buy a piece of wood to nail into the back so there's a backstop.

Cow_Art i'm in awe of your listening room. Serious #goals.

i'm lucky in that I used to be pretty good friends with a guy who did carpentry and interior design. he gave me cost price for a custom birch ply setup with these sorts of cubes, but as drawers, built to the height that you'd want to put turntables on top of. i've still never seen anything like it for sale.

i say "used to" - nothing happened, but he moved to the swedish countryside a few years ago, so it's pretty hard to see him.

Thanks! It’s our living room; my wife is cool as hell. She was a little put out when I put the stereo gear in the fireplace, but we live in Georgia. When the hell are we ever going to need a fireplace?

That’s a life-size self-portrait in bronze, btw.

i initially thought it was a mannequin! your response to my joke had me perplexed :)

i bought my ikea shelves used on craiglist. they have never been super nice. after moving about four or five times, they're plenty dinged up and not at all sturdy.

i don't need anything super fancy. in fact, i've been looking to construct something similar to the shelves in bulb's link. just something simple, economical, and sturdy for all my books and records.

a friend recently spent $5k on two shelves that probably hold around 1000 records? they look awesome but

jeez, I built my own shelf that holds more than that for maybe $200 in materials

you should post new pics so we can see how they're holding up after 14 years

those are the old ones, they look the same. the new one is prob built to the same general specs as shelf #2 above, but with real wood not particle board, it's a tank

just recently got hold of 15 metres of old recycled oak boards which will soon house the rest of my lps currently residing in boxes with some room to spare (i hope!)