Solid Wood vs. Stainless Steel – When people go to build cabinets, be it for their home, office, or elsewhere, the first question that comes up is what material the cabinets to be should be made from. There are several obvious choices, the main two often arising as wood or metal. There are several things to consider when deciding whether you should use wood or metal to construct your shelves, and the first is where they are going to go and what they are going to hold. Wood can hold a great deal of weight as opposed to it’s material weight, but stainless steel can hold even more. Stainless steel is also immune to many problems that plagues wood such as rotting and mildewing. These last two problems can be stopped in wood with the use of preventative chemicals that are applied to the product. One thing is certain though, since wood is organic, it will lose strength and integrity as time progresses.
Another thing to think about before beginning your project is the budget. If you have a very low budget, you might want to think about investing in wooden shelving units since they are much cheaper to produce than stainless steel. Along the same lines, if you are a novice workman, working with metal can be dangerous and difficult. Fabricated metal is very sharp when cut, and can make sharp fragments when being drilled, so much care needs to be taken when working with this material.
If the budget is not an option, there is a product out on the market that is stainless steel and easy to work with. Pre-made stainless steel shelving units. These are quite nice as the manufacturer will tell you exactly how much they will hold, plus they have construction instructions included with them. Many of these kits are customizable to the users needs, as they have a many sets of pre-drilled holes in them so you can mount the actual shelves wherever they need to be. Spartan? Yes. Unsightly? Yes. Efficient and Strong? Yes to both. I wouldn’t recommend these to store the family heirlooms in the living room, but for all those heavy items in the garage that need to be store for long periods of time, these are perfect.
Just because you wouldn’t want pre-fabricated shelves in the living room, this doesn’t mean that anything else will do. Aesthetics are something that people don’t put a lot of thought into when constructing a set of shelves for a room. Sure, they might wonder what color it is, or where it should hang on the wall. The shelves are soon going to be part of a room, people will see it as an extension of the room itself. For decorative shelves, metal usually only has a place in super contemporary homes where everything else is made from glass and most all of it was bought from Ikea. Try and select trim pieces to put on the wood that match the trim pieces in the rest of the wood, this will give it a much more natural look. If there are other shelves in the room, try to emulate their style to match them up.
If the room would look good with wood stylings in them, think about adding some stain instead of paint to the shelves to give the wood a much more nice, natural look.
