Bike inner-tube shelves

In my wanderings on the interwebz, I came across a going green contest, where people were upcycling this that and the other.  One of the entries was a man who had made shelves out of two furniture feet and some bike inner tubes.

The heck you say?

Well I thought that was kind of groovy, so I set out to replicate it.  I was thinking it might be a perfect way to store the excess DVDs that were stacked atop my DVD shelving unit.  I didn't have any furniture feet, so I had to make something that would work.  Bart's barn provided a large thick dowel that started out it's life as a closet bar, and a piece of particle board.  Total cost, $1.75.  I cut the dowel into 8 inch lengths and the particle board into 5 inch squares. I marked the middle of both, drilled holes, and screwed one to the other.

I used inch and three quarters deck screws for this so they wouldn't come apart.

And then everything got painted fire engine red.

*insert siren noises here*

The inner tubes I acquired by going to my local bike repair shop and asking for any punctured tubes they were going to be throwing away.  I figured they probably had some fancy recycling program to turn them into shoes for starving children in third world countries or those rubber fall zones at playgrounds, but lucky for me, shipping them costs too much to make anyone want to recycle them, and I got myself several handfuls.

So I found two tubes the same size, and saved the rest for another project. I mounted one of my bright red brackets, and then hung the tubes on it.  I hooked the other bracket to the tubes and stretched it as far as I could and marked the spot on the wall.  Then I unhooked the tubes, screwed the second bracket into place, stretched the tubes between them, and loaded it up with my excessive DVD collection.

I'm kind of impressed this worked at all actually.

I may have to tweak the placement of the brackets a bit, because those tubes are a lot more stretchy than I assumed.