What’s going on guys? It’s Hai.
My office wall has been pretty bare and I’ve been contemplating what to hang on it for a while. I ultimately decided on some floating shelves and I was originally going to buy some but for the size of shelf that I was going for, some of the cost that I saw were ridiculous. So in this blog, I want to share with you how I went about making my own for a very affordable price.
First, let’s start with the wood. I wanted 3 shelves that are 4’ long and 8” wide. From experience, I knew that construction lumber would probably be the cheapest option so I just went to my local Lowe’s. Here, the cheapest option was some 2”x8”x8’ Hemlock for $12.53. This is cheap but was my second choice. I was really going for some 2”x8”x8’ Douglas Fir which would cut the price by more than in half at $4.98 a board. I would need (2) 8’ boards and that would give me (4) 4’ shelves. With Hemlock, that would equate to about $3.13 a shelf but had my Lowe’s had the Douglas Fir in stock, the shelves would’ve only cost about $1.25 a shelf, making it VERY affordable.
Now, I’m no professional woodworker. I just know enough to get things done for my own personal projects. And for this project, I experimented with some stuff that I’ve never used before so I don’t want to give any outright recommendations. I’m just going to show you what I did and give some thoughts.
Again, I wanted (4) 4’ shelves so I ripped the 8’ boards down to size with a miter saw. For this project, I decided to make black shelves because that would best match the color scheme of the room. There’s a variety of ways to make the shelves black but I decided to try MinWax True Black oil-based stain, something I’ve never used before.
In preparation for the stain, I sanded the boards first with 150 grit sandpaper, then 220 grit. This is to get a smoother more presentable finish on the final product and to help the stain soak into the wood. But, I did purposely pick lumber that had more character and imperfections as I was going for a farmhouse aesthetic, so I did try too hard to get a perfect finish.
Once I was happy with the sanding, I moved on to the staining process. To start, I applied a coat of pre-stain. This product helps to distribute the stain more evenly so less blotching occurs with the stain. I have had blotching problems with hemlock in the past so pre-stain is something that I personally now use. The pre-stain itself is very quick and easy to apply. I just used a foam brush to spread it around. The directions say to let it sit for 5-15 minutes, then apply your stain within 2 hours.
Moving on to the actual staining, again, I used Minwax True Black oil-based stain. I’ve been looking for a way to ebonize wood and now that I’ve tried this product, I would say that it’s a very viable option. I don’t know if you can tell, but it comes out jet black like you’re dumping ink on the wood. It may look like much at first but it does thin up a bit when dried and you can still see all the figures in the wood. This is my first time trying this product and I would recommend to not apply a heavy application like I did because it does spread quite well and if you go heavy, this stuff takes a while to dry. It didn’t help that I was doing all this in a cold garage during winter so it took about a day to dry between coats. I did two coats to achieve the look that I wanted so that was two days of just waiting.
Then we move on to applying a finish. I used MinWax polyurethane and the same as before, I just spread it on with a foam brush. Once that’s dried, we can move on to mounting these shelves up.
Now there’s not really much to this step as it really depends on your application and how you want to mount them. I ended up doing three staggered shelves. I went with some brackets that I found on Amazon, which are linked in the description below, and they work just fine but if you go with the same brackets, I would recommend finding your own hardware because the ones that these brackets came with are complete trash. The heads stripped so easily and I had 3 screws that just snapped in half. There are two screws that are broken in my wall where I hit a stud and one that’s lodged at the bottom of a shelf. This shearing happened even with a pilot hole so I would definitely recommend buying your own hardware if possible.
And that’s about it. Some potentially very cheap DIY floating shelves. Depending on the materials that you already have, this project can potentially be very cheap, I mean, like less than $10 if you have the know-how. I bought my brackets because I wanted this look but you can make your own which can bring the cost down even lower. It all depends on what you're going for. Then to spice things up, you can add LED lighting or whatever else to make the shelves really stand out. I’m still working through decorating and what I’m actually using these shelves for so this isn’t finalized.
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