crafted home: Aged wood floating shelves

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.