The shelves go up

Two 8-foot bookshelves, one on each side of the bed. Simple plan, except the studs in this wall refuse to land where the shelves want them. Drilling a loaded bookcase into bare drywall is how you wake up to a pile of books at 3am, so that's out.

The fix is a ledger board: a length of plywood screwed across the studs first, then the shelves mount into that instead of the wall. The load path becomes brackets to board to studs, and the board doesn't care where the brackets fall. I'm painting it the same green as the wall so it disappears.

I've never done anything like this, so I wrote the whole thing up for whoever I hire. First real test of the new workshop notebook.