Had a guy ask me to build him a floating shelf that could hold his bowling ball collection
I was working a job over in Oak Park last month, framing out a basement for this older fella. He comes down and sees my layout lines on the plywood, and he gets this real serious look. He points to a bare stretch of wall and says he wants a shelf there, no brackets showing, and it's gotta hold 16 bowling balls. I thought he was joking until he showed me the rack in his garage... 16 balls, all custom drilled with his name. I tried explaining that a floating shelf without supports would need some serious blocking and maybe a steel bracket inside the wall, but he kept saying he'd seen it done on TV. So I put in three 2x4s bolted to the studs and covered it with oak, no way that thing's coming down. He looked at it later and said it didn't look "floating" enough, but I told him floating means it stays on the wall not ends up on the floor. Has anyone else run into customers who want physics to bend for their ideas?