Industrial Floating Shelves

Heidi
by Heidi
Our son's bedroom has recently undergone a mini-makeover and to complete it, we thought some floating shelves on each side of his double window would give him a place to set his special toys and books. To make the shelves more appealing, we added some industrial hardware.
This is what his bedroom looked like before we added shelving. The walls were painted with Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter and the built-ins and trim got a fresh coat of Benjamin Moore White Dove paint. His bed was part of an old bunk bed set that we took apart and painted Benjamin Moore Hale Navy.
We purchased this hardware from the home improvement store. Since we had 4 shelves, we bought 8 sets of the hardware.
After my husband built the floating shelves, he drilled two holes towards the front of each shelf for the hardware. He attached the long turnbuckle to the U-shaped hardware and fastened it underneath of the shelf with a metal plate and some nuts.
This is the metal plate that came with the U-shaped hardware and is visible on the underside of the floating shelf.
Then we attached the turnbuckle to this wall hook and screwed it to the wall. Since this hardware is only decorative and not meant to actually support the shelf, we did not need to use wall anchors.
The shelves were stained with a dark walnut and then a top coat of weathered gray stain. You can see the exact products we used in our blog post.
Our son loves his new shelves! For more inspiration we are on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Kruses-Workshop-544083725671242/
Heidi
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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  • Lainey Howell Lainey Howell on Jun 01, 2016
    If the hardware is purely decorative, what is holding up the shelves? The post didn't mention anything about how they were hung. I love this look, but am puzzled about how the were hing.
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  • Lissa Taylor Lissa Taylor on May 31, 2016
    Love the bracket system! Going to do this for my sons room!
  • Beth Beth on Nov 12, 2020

    If you were going to put brackets on them anyway, why bother to create the floating shelves? The bracket hardware is perfectly adequate to support the shelves, so it was overkill to support the shelves on 1x2's or whatever you used (you didn't say). And with brackets on them -- decorative or not -- they are no longer "floating" shelves!

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