Furniture Leveling Feet
This project started on a rainy day when my partner notified me of a shelf that was sitting on the curb waiting to be thrown away. I stopped to check it out and it was in good condition so we decided to take it home. We’ve been storing boxes of food on the floor in the corner of the kitchen so this shelf was perfect for organizing a bit. The shelf was made of untreated pine so I stained it with a blue-colored stain that we previously purchased for refinishing our end tables (I didn’t like this color for those tables, but I thought this blue would look OK against the yellow paint in the kitchen). Our house is older and every room has uneven floors so I needed some way of leveling this shelf if I was going to store heavy objects on it. I wanted something cheap and fast, so it had to be available in the United States, and ideally, I would get enough parts to do other furniture around the house.
I ended up settling on these GLE2016 plastic adjustable screw-on leveling feet. I couldn’t find anything else that matched the price or was the size that I wanted. I wasn’t sure how I was going to mount them until after they arrived. I found that the thread is M8 x 1.25, so I bought some nuts in that size from the local hardware store, but they’re also available online if you want to save yourself a trip.
To make it easy to mount the nuts into the furniture, I 3D-printed a nut holder that prevents the nut from spinning and adapts the size to something I could easily drill. You can find the file for the adapter on Thingiverse. Its outside diameter is 3/4" so I drilled that size hole to mount these adapters. I learned that it was best to drill a small pilot hole to line this up, then the 3/4" hole to the depth of the nut holder, and then finish with a deeper 5/16" hole to accept the M8 bolt. Since the wood was so thin on this shelf, I also held the parts in place with BSI Quik-Cure Epoxy.
I ordered so many feet because I also wanted to level the two nightstands in the bedroom. They were so out of level that the drawers would slide out on their own. In the end, one of the leveling feet didn’t even have enough travel to fully level out, so I had to add a furniture pad to gain the extra height. The nightstands were made with nice hardwood so I was able to be more accurate with the holes and didn’t need epoxy to hold the plastic inserts in place.
I also added leveling feet to my shelf that I covered in another post. I didn’t use the plastic nut holder for this shelf because the wood was too thin. On these, I drilled a 1/2" hole and then used a Dremel to cut out the six points of the nut. This design required more work but nuts fit just as snug as the 3D-printed parts.
I’m happy that I have level furniture in my house now, but I don’t know if it was worth the trouble of designing and printing the plastic parts and buying cheap hardware versus just buying ready-made hardware that would’ve been quicker to install. Either way, I had fun putting this all together!
