
Also, I learned a lot along the way, so don’t be intimidated by the project, or think you need special tools.
#Live edge wood floating shelf how to#
If you’re more experienced, maybe you can give me some tips, but if you’re like, “but this looks like more than a beginner knows how to do!” keep in mind that I followed advice I got from a friend who has a lot of experience building things. That basically describes me when we hung our kitchen shelves in 2015. These instructions are geared for an advanced beginner, who knows how to use basic power tools but maybe hasn’t done any actual building or carpentry. You can see that the left side has a couple of big, ugly gouges, but the nice part on the right was just the right size for my shelf. So I’ll start the tutorial here, with a slab of unfinished, live-edge wood. I forgot to take a picture of the whole thing, but here it is right after I chopped it in half for this project: The nicest leftover piece got some hairpin legs, and became a live-edge bench. The other chunk had some big flaws, which is why we cut around it for our original shelves.
#Live edge wood floating shelf full#
When we bought the wood at Salvage Works, we had to buy full boards that were more than we needed for the shelves. One was a big scrap of the off-cuts of the alder wood from our kitchen shelves. Is that a phrase women are more familiar with, because it came from “shop your closet?”)Īfter a bit of poking around in my own messy piles of wood, I found a couple of suitable candidates. (When I told Steven I was “shopping our garage” for wood, he was confused. A shelf was an obvious solution, so I went shopping in my garage for a piece of wood to turn into a shelf. Styling up the spot as a dresser/vanity area seemed like a good idea, but the wall needed something to fill the space. When life gives you empty closet space, make it as useful and pretty as possible. So I could have added more drawers, but c’est la vie. Aka, installing the rack proved to be too much of a pain-in-the-ass with the slanted ceiling. I left the drawers on one side at around counter height because I was planning to mount a rack above them, but I ended up changing my mind after I’d already finished the drawer box and installed the drawers.

I’ll be using a small shelf in my walk-in closet for this tutorial, but we hung our kitchen shelves the same way, except with three brackets instead of two, and bigger shelves.įirst, let me back up a little bit and give you some context. I’ve been making over my walk-in closet, mainly by adding built-in Ikea drawers. So if you’re trying to hang floating solid wood shelves, here’s how to do it.


Obviously I eventually figured it out, but aside from sharing the hardware we used, I didn’t do a full how-to for hanging floating live-edge shelves. Even the place I bought the wood didn’t have any advice, but they asked me to tell them how I ended up doing it. That doesn’t work if you’re just trying to attach a solid slab of wood to your wall with hidden hardware.

There are plenty of tutorials for DIY floating shelves, but they’re the kind that are built from plywood, and have the hardware concealed inside a wood box. When I was trying to figure out how to hang the live-edge floating shelves in our kitchen, I had a lot of trouble finding instructions and hardware for how to hang solid wood floating shelves.
