Meg & John vs. The Living Room: DIY floating shelves (with a little help)

I am sorry it took me so long to post about our lovely new shelves. Though I am pretty sure only my mom is anxious to see them =).

I had the idea to do a crown molding knock-off shelf, and found a pretty thorough tutorial on this site. We got excited, bought some inexpensive molding, I took the ugly brackets off our old shelves, and... procrastinated trying to figure out how to cut and attach the molding. Luckily a handy friend of ours was over, took a look at what I had picked up, then took all the shelves home and put them together for us in about an hour. I am positive it would have taken me approximately 17 times that long.

So all we had left was to mount them. We wanted to use the existing plaster mounting thingies (that is the technical term) left from the old shelves, since they were already level and at the right height. The basic plan was to attach a 2x2 (that was cut on an angle on one side to fit inside the molding) directly to the wall, then to attach the floating shelf to that cleat, per the fix-it guy on the tutorial I referenced. I started by following this handy tip and putting toothpaste on each of the holes, then placing the board over the holes so we would know where to drill.

The result:

Next, we used my handy fabric ruler to mark a uniform height on each of our cleats.

We drilled holes in the wood, then screwed each beam to the wall.

I don't have any pictures of the next part, because my awesome husband did it all by himself while I was locked in our room reading Hunger Games. I am such a good wife. In short, you set the shelf on this cleat, then screw the shelf to the cleat through the top of the shelf. John drilled pilot holes in both the shelf and the cleat, drilled a countersink hole in the top of the shelf for the screw to fit into, then attached the shelves to the cleats. Now check out the before and after!

Love love love! The only thing I have to brag about this project is that I have an awesome husband who took a night off from studying even though I was slacking off because he knew how excited I was about getting these shelves fixed up.

Meg vs. The Living Room: Shelves!

Saturday:  Change oil in the car. Straighten the garage.

It was raining and we were unexpectedly busy today. Ergo no oil change... onto next week docket it goes! BUT my awesome hubby spent a good part of the day (When he should have been studying) putting up the living room shelves! And they look awesome!


The only bad part is that my back-up camera is now non-functional, and my back-up back-up is lost (had it earlier, pretty sure the kiddos hid it). So photos will have to wait. Boo. I will have to go look at my new shelves to cheer myself up.

Meg vs. The Living Room: Touch-up paint and painted shelves

Monday: Sand, fill, and paint shelves for the living room.


I tried to start on the shelves during "nap time," but my kids didn't cooperate with my well-laid plans, so I quickly filled a couple of holes and then ran back inside to the child presently making a ruckus.

Instead I decided to start on Wednesday's goal of touching up the paint, since it was mostly in places out of little ones' reach and was something I could do while watching the boys, and also do in little spurts without too much consequence on the results. But once the perfectionist goggles were on, the places I wanted to fix just kept popping up. There were a lot of places where the molding wasn't really straight, so the straight tape lines actually left little gaps in between the paint and the molding. You really can't tell much of a difference here, but it was just noticeable to be really annoying. Finally at just before 11pm I finally decided it was good enough.

All touched up and ready for shelves!

After a glass of water and an ice cream sundae, I forced myself out to the garage to squeeze in as much work on the shelves as I could manage before I collapsed in exhaustion. I finished a little sanding, wiped them down, and slapped a coat of paint on each one. Now two shelves have one coat and one shelf has two. They'll all need another coat or two tomorrow, but I will call today's mission accomplished.

I am already behind on tomorrow's goal because even though we put the can out at 6:30 a.m., apparently we missed the green waste truck. I am seriously tempted to ask my neighbors if I can borrow theirs, because not a single other person has had theirs out in the last few weeks. Alas, I feel too guilty making that my first real acquaintance with these people... Here's to another week with the giant tree branch in our driveway!