DIY Floating Shelves
Hi all! Fall appears to have officially arrived, which here in the desert means it's finally regularly below 100 degrees. I am all about it. Sweaters! No A/C! Yes, it's still 80 degrees by mid-afternoon, but I'll take what I can get.
The arrival of fall and the rapidly approaching holiday season (anyone else procrastinating on their kid's costume??) made David and I realize we really should finish up all the projects that we wanted to get done this year. For us, the big one is finishing up our fireplace accent wall. (Check out parts I and II if you missed it.)
Last time you saw it, our wall looked like this:
I painted the wall a rich navy color and German-smeared the fireplace. We love it, but knew we wanted to add a raw wood accent, and opted for some floating shelves.
Note: the inspiration for these shelves came from this awesome Chris Loves Julia tutorial.
I knew I wanted raw, unstained wood with just a clear sealant on it, so I popped into Home Depot to check out my options. I ended up deciding on poplar. It's an extremely hard wood so it takes a little more work to cut and drill, but the color is exactly what I was looking for. It's almost white with very few yellow or pink tones. I took my time selecting the pieces I wanted, as some of the boards did have a lot of green in them. Most of the pieces are extremely neutral, but I also selected a couple of boards with pretty darker brown graining.
For this project, we used the 1x12 boards (second from the left). Ignore the rest for now, because (spoiler alert) we haven't finished the second part of this project yet. We had them cut to size at the Home Depot, exactly the width of the wall on either side of the fireplace.
Once we got them home, we ripped the boards into three pieces. We only needed one 1x12 board for each shelf. The measuring here got a little tricky (at least for me, since I am the WORST at math). We knew we wanted the shelf to be the exact same depth as the fireplace mantel, which was 8 1/4". We took into consideration the board's actual size, since a 1x12 is actually 3/4" x 11 1/4". Then we had to consider how the boards would stack when we screwed them together. The back piece would hang down behind the bottom piece, and the lip would screw into the top of the bottom board. This meant the bottom piece (left) wound up being 7.5", the lip (right) wound up being 3/4", and the back piece (middle) was whatever was leftover, which was 3".
I'm sure this will make more sense visually. See below:
We screwed the back piece into the bottom piece from the back, and the bottom piece into the lip from the bottom.
Then we sanded everything smooth and made sure the seams were as tight as we could make them so it looks seamless.
Initially I wanted to hang the shelves so the bottom of the shelf was level with the mantel, but it looked silly with the lip sticking up. We wound up hanging them so the top of the lip is level with the mantel, which looks much nicer.
We are super happy with them so far, but still have a lot of work to do to finish up this wall. Plans are to get her done this weekend, so another post will be coming your way! Wish us luck . . .
The arrival of fall and the rapidly approaching holiday season (anyone else procrastinating on their kid's costume??) made David and I realize we really should finish up all the projects that we wanted to get done this year. For us, the big one is finishing up our fireplace accent wall. (Check out parts I and II if you missed it.)
Last time you saw it, our wall looked like this:
I painted the wall a rich navy color and German-smeared the fireplace. We love it, but knew we wanted to add a raw wood accent, and opted for some floating shelves.
Note: the inspiration for these shelves came from this awesome Chris Loves Julia tutorial.
I knew I wanted raw, unstained wood with just a clear sealant on it, so I popped into Home Depot to check out my options. I ended up deciding on poplar. It's an extremely hard wood so it takes a little more work to cut and drill, but the color is exactly what I was looking for. It's almost white with very few yellow or pink tones. I took my time selecting the pieces I wanted, as some of the boards did have a lot of green in them. Most of the pieces are extremely neutral, but I also selected a couple of boards with pretty darker brown graining.
For this project, we used the 1x12 boards (second from the left). Ignore the rest for now, because (spoiler alert) we haven't finished the second part of this project yet. We had them cut to size at the Home Depot, exactly the width of the wall on either side of the fireplace.
Once we got them home, we ripped the boards into three pieces. We only needed one 1x12 board for each shelf. The measuring here got a little tricky (at least for me, since I am the WORST at math). We knew we wanted the shelf to be the exact same depth as the fireplace mantel, which was 8 1/4". We took into consideration the board's actual size, since a 1x12 is actually 3/4" x 11 1/4". Then we had to consider how the boards would stack when we screwed them together. The back piece would hang down behind the bottom piece, and the lip would screw into the top of the bottom board. This meant the bottom piece (left) wound up being 7.5", the lip (right) wound up being 3/4", and the back piece (middle) was whatever was leftover, which was 3".
I'm sure this will make more sense visually. See below:
We screwed the back piece into the bottom piece from the back, and the bottom piece into the lip from the bottom.
Then we sanded everything smooth and made sure the seams were as tight as we could make them so it looks seamless.
Initially I wanted to hang the shelves so the bottom of the shelf was level with the mantel, but it looked silly with the lip sticking up. We wound up hanging them so the top of the lip is level with the mantel, which looks much nicer.
We screwed the shelves into studs, using two 2" screws for each stud. You may notice that the left side has 4 sets of screws and the right side has 5. This is because my fireplace is a few inches off center. The left hand shelf is a few inches shorter than the right. That won't drive me crazy for the rest of my life.
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