The Coolest Hockey Bedroom EVER – The Corner Shelf

The Coolest Hockey Bedroom EVER is a series of posts chronicling the transformation from a boring bedroom to a hockey heaven for my son. You can read about his dresser here, his locker here, his headboard here, and his hockey stick hooks here. Have an idea for the room? Comment below.

When you’re a little kid, you have popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, and Elmer’s glue. When you’re an adult, you have broken composite hockey sticks, screws, and a power drill.

*GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT*

This is when you know you've 'made it'.

I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about a broken hockey stick that infatuates me. One day it’s sniping biscuits off the bar, at the top of its game and in the hands of the world’s best, the next day it’s fractured, discarded, and completely worthless. Well, worthless to MOST. Thanks to my dad, who does security for a local AHL team, I came to own a pile of discarded sticks over the course of several months. Dozens of meticulously crafted works of art, sitting sadly in a pile that nobody else wanted. Until now.

What we’re building today is a corner shelf. The Easter Bunny surprised our oldest with a small flat-screen TV and DVD player, but EB neglected to address the placement of said electronics, choosing instead to prop them up on an old living-room end table, within reach of the very curious twins we share our house with. Shame shame, rabbit. So rather than wait until one of the twins pulled the power cord hard enough to pull it down, I decided to build something to place the TV higher and out of reach.

Before You Start

  • You’re doing this at your own risk. If you cut your hand off, it’s on you. Literally and figuratively.
  • Wear a mask, gloves, and eye protection. Look, I’m a dude, and I’ve been known to build things shirtless in my socks. I know how it goes. But composite sticks are made with some nasty ingredients, and when you’re cutting then, they produce very fine dust that itches and makes you cough. So take this warning seriously.
  • The Support

    This may be the most important step of all. What you want to do is identify your studs and make sure you anchor these first two pieces into them, particularly if you want this thing to hold a TV or other heavy items. Most houses have studs that are 16″ apart. My 1960’s-built house had one stud 10″ from the corner, then another one 16″ out from that. This meant that I had to go 26″ out from the corner — larger than I originally intended, but not a major problem.

    Regardless of whether you’re using wooden sticks or composite, you’ll want to drill pilot holes slightly smaller than the hardware you’re using, and be sure said hardware is strong enough to support the weight of everything it will be holding. I had bolts on hand, so I used them in lieu of thinner screws.

    Another important step is to ensure both supports are level — both with the floor and with each other. And leave a small gap between the sticks to run cabling, if necessary.

    Click the thumbnails to enlarge.




    The Surface

    I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to go about this until I began cutting. I estimated the size of the first piece and cut opposing 45-degree angles. Back in the bedroom, I slid it back on the supports until it touched the wall. It left a small gap in the corner, perfect for routing cables.

    Here is where it gets trickier. If you want all of your sticks to be flush against each other, you need to make sure that each subsequent stick is just larger than the one before it. Here’s how to do that.

  • You’ll need to start with the first piece you cut, so grab that.
  • Take another piece of stick and lay it next to the first one. The 45-degree cuts you make on every stick need to align with the 45-degree cuts you made on the stick before.
  • Using this picture as your guide, place both sticks on your mitre saw (I’ve already made the cut on the right side). Put the first stick closest to the gate, then line the blade up so that is just skims the first stick and cuts the second stick. What I did was lower the blade to ensure the cut would align with the first, then made the cut.
  • The end result is that each subsequent stick will be the correct side and will be flush up against the one before it.




    Finishing The Job

    From there it’s just a matter of cutting enough sticks to complete the shelf. I used clear adhesive caulk to attach one stick to the next, making sure not to use too much. Then the final stick (the front piece of the shelf) was secured with two screws drilled into the support pieces. Since I used composite sticks, the whole unit is very light and strong, and can be disassembled with relative ease.

    For my extra-large shelf, I used 17 individual pieces of stick (including the two support pieces), which was probably somewhere around 14 total hockey sticks (since the first few pieces are small). I have a TON of leftover blades and butt ends, though I did use a few taped butt ends to give it character. And of course I made sure that the front piece showed the “FOR PROFESSIONAL USE ONLY” label. Because that’s about as cool as it gets.

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