Wow, it's been a while (again), although this past weekend was super productive around here. One project that's been on our plate for a little while has been to add shelves above the new desk we built in the study. Between waffling on where we wanted the shelves to be hung and either being out of town or having visitors, building the shelves got put off for a little while, but it was at the very top of the to-do list this weekend. We ended up going with two shelves above the main surface of the desk, both 15" deep and built from 3/4" birch plywood with 1x2 pine tacked and glued across the face. I originally wanted to hang them the same way the desk is hung -- with ledger boards on the three walls supporting their weight -- but we ended up using shelf brackets instead since the sides would have rested on ledgers that weren't tacked into joists in the front (given that the joists are 16" apart, and the shelves are 15" deep). We want to be able to put some serious weight on these shelves (medical reference books, magazine archives, that sort of thing), so the idea of using drywall anchors made me just nervous enough to go with brackets for support.

One related interlude: we started out with the idea that using low-profile brackets like these might work out OK, sacrificing what felt like just a little bit of load-bearing capacity for the benefit of a bracket that didn't create as much of an obstacle underneath it. Thus, we hung the first shelf with these brackets, and immediately realized that the weight of the shelf itself was enough to start bowing the supports -- and that's when we both got the mental picture of what would happen when we started loading the shelves, and then immediately took the brackets down. We ended up with these, which are very slender and yet feel like they could support me up on the shelves. If we end up hating how they look or function, I can always try the drywall anchor approach, or add a backer board between the joists and then anchor a ledger into that.

A few things we did to make the results that much nicer (to us, at least!): I routed a rounded edge onto the front of the shelves using a 3/8" roundover bit, and we added a few under-cabinet lights to the bottom shelf so that we could get rid of our desk lamp and still have great light on the work surface.