The Making of Suitcase Shelves

One of my new ventures has been creating furniture and accent pieces from vintage suitcases. A few months before leaving St. Louis I saw something on Pintrest that sparked my fancy - a very unique wall display using vintage suitcases as shelves. However I didn't like the idea that each shelf was mainly a "ledge." I was determined to figure out how I could do this and do it better.

The inspiration!

I put out a Craigslist feeler and found someone getting rid of a ton of vintage suitcases and I quickly picked them up. Fast forward a few months and you'd be shocked how handy those suitcases came to be during a move :).

After we had unpacked all the suit cases I was determined to figure out a way to make the shelves, especially since the boyfriend would be jobless for a bit and is a carpenter by trade. Together we went to Home Depot and scoped out all different types of items we could use to create the shelf bracketing system. I wanted something that would be easy for people to install, but also sturdy. My thought process was that if we could put u-shaped brackets inside of the suitcase and then find L-shaped mounting brackets it'd be a breeze to install the L-shaped brackets and slip the suitcase shelves onto them. It took us a bit to find all the materials (the u-shaped brackets were tricky to locate) but we did!

The prototypes

The results are suitcase shelves that are 10in in depth - giving you plenty of space to actually display items, that are sturdy and functional!

I'd like to start doing custom orders - helping people determine styles and color combos and creating rocking centerpiece displays like the one I ended up installing in our living room from my prototype pieces.

What do you think? Would you like something like this in your home?

The finished results!

Interested in ordering suitcase shelves? Fill out the form attached and email it to me at mandyheth@gmail.com