Aged wood floating shelves - DIY with instructions!

I could not be more excited to share our most recent kitchen project with everyone! For this project, we had the amazing opportunity to team up with Ottawa's new Lowe's location on Hunt Club. For the longest time, I've been so excited about Lowe's coming to Canada. We frequently go shopping across the border, and it's always been one of our favorite stops (Joel loves their selection of electrical tools, and I just love anything to do with renos and decorating.) I couldn't have been happier when I heard that we were not only getting another location in our city, but that it was about 3 minutes away from our house!

Lowe's was kind enough to agree to team up with us as we built our aged wood floating shelves, and we are just so happy with the results!

In our house, we do a lot of projects using old wood (such as our counters and our pallet wall.) For these shelves, we wanted to find a way to make new wood look old, so that it would keep in the tradition of the other projects we've done in our house. We found an idea for shelves here, and drew up some plans so that they would fit our home.

We made our big trip to Lowe's on Valentine's Day, which is actually pretty appropriate for us. I had to drag Joel away from the power tools so that we could choose our supplies for our shelves.

Here are the plans we came up with for our shelves, which hopefully some of you can use:

Buy list:

•  Four 2 x 4 x 8 feet
• Two 2 x 1 x 8 feet
•  Plexiglass (enough to make three pieces that are 9” x 38”)
•  12 hex bolts (5/8 diameter) and washers

Cut list (if take this with you to Lowe’s and they can do the cuts for you!)

• Six 2 x 4 x 41” (these are the front and back of your shelves)
• Six 2 x 4 x 9”  (these are the sides of your shelves)
• Fifteen 2 x 1 x 9” (five support slats per shelf)
• Plexiglass – three 9” x 38”

We did our cuts at home, but we could have just as easily had them cut for us at Lowe's. I think Joel is just so happy to have a garage to work in that he looks for any excuse to get his tools out!

 After you've made the cuts, you can start to assemble your shelves.

 Joel always uses a drill to pre-drill the holes, which lessens the chance that the wood will split. Then, he uses an impact to screw in the screws (for this project, he used 2 1/2 inch screws in black.)

 While Joel worked on this, I started to spray the hex bolts and washers in a flat black. I love Rust-Oleum's Universal spray paint in Flat Black. I've used it for several projects, and just love the flat, matte finish it gives.
 A good tip for spraying all around screws quickly is to lightly screw them into a piece of cardboard - that way they stand up, so you can get all sides in one spray.

After the box is assembled, the next step is to cut the Plexiglass. Some of the Lowe's locations in our city are able to cut Plexiglass in store, but Joel and I were curious to try doing it ourselves with a plastic cutting tool. We knew our exact measurement needed, but decided to use the assembled box to trace out our cuts anyway, just in case. We drew light lines onto the plexiglass using pencil, then used a T-Square to make sure that our cuts were crisp.

It was nice to have two people on this - I held down the T-Square while Joel cut with the plastic cutter. Don't you love how we did this whole project in our living room? It's just too cold here to work in the garage.

Once you've gone over your cut line several times, the Plexiglass should just snap apart.

Now you're going to put the Plexiglass under the box, and start to insert the support slats. If you do this upside down on a flat surface, it will naturally leave that small amount your Plexiglass needs to sit on top of.

Place one slat flush with the side wood, then space out your slats 9.5" from each other (I can tell that I took this picture before all of the slats were perfectly spaced!) Use a brad nailer with 2" nails to attach your slats.

 

Then, flip your shelf over, and sit your lovely cut of Plexiglass on top.

While Joel worked on finishing building the shelves, I started to paint our shelf wall. It had previously looked like this, so it definitely needed some paint!

Once the shelves are all made, it is time for the fun part - making the wood look aged! This is a lot simpler than you'd think. First you need to find a bunch of different kinds of metals:

Then take your hammer and bang the heck out of your wood. Different mediums give different results. In some spots I just used the hammer and hit random patterns:

 Here you can see where I hammered the screws, the end of the key, and the flat part of the screwdriver. I also hit the corners of my wood, to give them a more rounded look.

It looks silly while you're doing it, but the stain sort of finds its way into the dings, and gives a nice, natural, darker-than-the-rest-of-the-wood look. (I'll also say that it was almost impossible to get good photos of this process, as it was midnight and the lighting was just terrible.)

My next step to making my wood look aged was in the staining. I started by applying my stain, Minwax in Dark Walnut, all over my wood, leaving it on for a good 15 minutes. After removing it, I went over just the edges, leaving it on another 10 or so minutes, to give the illusion of an unevenly stained piece of wood (the middle piece is finished, and the top and bottom still have stain on them.)

The last piece of the puzzle was adding on our matte black hex bolts. We bought short bolts, as we were just adding them on for aesthetics, not to actually hold the wood together.

Since ours were just for looks, Joel pre-drilled holes close enough to our screws that the washers would cover them. To install the hex bolts, use a 9/16ths socket.

At this point, the construction is done! Now, onto the installation.

Joel really wanted to do under cabinet lights, and when he saw these ones for $35 at Lowe's, he was pretty set on having them for our shelves. These lights are extremely easy to install, especially if you are going to keep them on a plug (as they're intended to be used.) Joel's an electrician, so he decided to rig them up to a switch so that we could switch them on and off when we want to use them. He installed three lights on the bottom shelf, under three of the support slats.

To install the shelves, we just measured our area, and decided what was a reasonable amount of space to have for dishes in between shelves (a bit over 11"). We made sure the shelves were level, then I would hold while Joel screwed them into the studs.

Love those beauty lights!

Then, it was just a matter of getting the rest of the shelves up:

And finally... the beautiful, aged looking floating Plexiglass shelves were finished!

I love how the dishes look like they're floating from underneath. Is it wrong that I want to sit under my shelves and stare at them all night?

Here you can see some of the details from where I aged the wood:

We are so happy with our shelves, and SO thankful to the Lowe's on Hunt Club for teaming up with us for this project!

Here's what we have left to do in our kitchen:

• rebuild the cabinets under and beside the sink
• paint all cabinets (eek!)
• change out all hardware
• install shelves where the open cabinets are
• remove old backsplash 
• install hexagonal backsplash
• paint walls
• remove old floor and install new floor
• remove the panel in front of sink window
• new tiles in greenhouse window
• some kind of window covering for the greenhouse window
• put up some beautiful artwork

 We're definitely getting there! Next step - backsplash!

La fin - Homemade art shelf part TWO

Sooo my art shelf is all finished!

First of all, if you don't remember art shelf part 1, please refer to this post.

Basically where I left off, everything was done except for the top, caulking, painting, the siding for the back, and moving it into my classroom.

The first thing that I needed to do was go to Home Depot and get paint.

Simple, right?

Obviously you've never been out with me.

Apologies to Home Depot for this one.

Anyway. Let's move past that, shall we?

The first thing I had to do was caulk the cracks in all the corners. If you haven't used caulking, it's FUN. Really, it's super satisfying, it's like playdoh mixed with glue and it makes everything pretty. It's awesome. 

 Then I had to paint the wainscoting that I bought for the back pieces. 

 While I waited for Cody to come cut the wainscoting, I started painting!

 And painting.

 Then Cody began attaching the back panels. While I painted.

 And painted.

 And then.. it was DONE!

 I absolutely adore it. It reminds me of Cape Cod, and I feel so happy everytime I see it. Especially when you know what shelf it's replacing.

 See? This is what my art supplies were stored on before.

 And here they are now!

Huge thanks to Cody for all of the help with this project. I am not confident with power tools yet, so he did all of the hard work while I held things and used Gorilla Glue and made sound effects (read: eeee ee ee e ee oooh ooh ahh ahh.)


Aaaaaaaaaand that's it!

My biggest project to date

This is the first time I'm going to post a half finished project, only because I have been on it for the past month and we made such progress today and I want to share!

Basically, I decided about a month ago that I really wanted to have a great art shelf for my classroom. Something like this. But look at the price!! Obviously I don't have that kind of money. So one day while I was working at the daycare, I drew up what my dream cabinet would look like:I even tried to write down measurements, so that Joel would be more willing when I asked him to make it for me. Joel and Cody took me to Home Depot, and we bought a huge piece of MDF (which was terrifying to bring home, but I won't start on that.)

When I got the MDF home, I traced out all of the pieces onto it (which I planned on a piece of paper first) so that Joel and Cody could make the cuts. A couple of days later, I had this:
I did a REALLY quick, sloppy white coat of paint on the pieces as a base. These sat in our living room for a few weeks, until today, when Cody and I finally got a chance to go out and build the start of my DREAM SHELF! I took some pictures as we worked. Cody did all of the nailing, but I had the important job of putting GORILLA GLUE on everything. Here's me holding the bottle:
I did appropriate sound effects every time I glued, don't worry.


Great paint job, huh?
This is where I will store tupperware buckets full of markers, pencil crayons, etc.

I must have been Gorilla Glue-ing in a lot here, because there are no more pictures until the end:

Yay! The right side is for tupperwares, and random supplies on the top. On the left side, paint bottles will go on the bottom, legal sized paper on top, and the three shelves above are for regular sized paper. Beside that, I will put scrapbooking papers standing up.

Isn't it wonderful?
Here's what's left to do:

• Buy a bit more MDF for the top
• Buy thin slats of wood for the back
• Caulk the little gaps between the shelves
• Paint the whole shelf the color of the second swatch here
• Decide if I want to do a lip around the top
  

Hopefully I will be done this next week, so I can put it in my class before the beginning of school!