Sometimes you just need to convert your clutter.
I had several long pieces of ClosetMaid shelving in the garage. They are easily found at garage sales when people remodel. Even new, these pieces are surprisingly inexpensive, as I believe that ClosetMaid is doing a ‘razor’ and ‘razor blade’ strategy by selling the shelf part cheaply and the posts and shelf holders at a premium price.
They are ridiculously strong and fairly light.
By bending them appropriately, you can convert these shelves into a variety of useful items: magazine holder, monitor stand, paper tray, etc.
First get a piece of shelf.
Cut it to length using a hacksaw. For a monitor stand, I made the ‘vertical’ pieces 4″ and the horizontal shelf 11″ so I needed (2*4″+11″ = 19″ long). Watch for the off-by-one errors in length!
Cut the reinforcing bar all the way through and the parallel bars at the 4″ inch and 15″ mark part way through - so they bend cleanly.
Voila!
For a magazine rack, you’ll want the verticals at least 10″ but the base smaller - perhaps 4″-6″.
I think you can figure out the paper tray on your own.
Let me know if you make other cool things out of this item!
[The one on instructables.com has a little more information on it]