Looking for something to freshen up your home? Want to change your kitchen or bathroom but don’t want to spend a ton of money? Here is the solution - why not build shelves? They can give your home any vibe you want. Place your favourite books there and the room would feel elegant. Use it to display your family photos and you’ll get a nice, homey feeling. Place flowers and different accessories and you will get a stylish and modern vibe.

You’ve always wanted shelves but never had courage to build ones because it looks too difficult? It isn’t. You will be blown away when you see how easy you can do it. You can free your imagination and customize the shelves in any way you’d like.

You don’t have to have rich experience in the DYI projects in order to get it done. Remember: you can use any type of material, paint it in any colour, place it anywhere.

For your convenience, here you will see three different ways to build a shelf. You can pick the easiest or the one you like the most. 

# 1

The best place to pick for shelves is a wall that has little or no accessories, pictures and so on. It might look a little much if there already are other shelves, cabinets and such.

The first thing you need to do is pick the exact spot for the shelf. Once you do that, measure its length and width. You need a wooden board that has free space on the inside - this is where the elements hung to the wall fit.  

Now that you have the exact measurements of the board, you need 3 long rectangular wooden “sticks”. Make sure the width of the inside part of the board perfectly matches the size of these blocks. Then use studs and screw the blocks to the wall. Now all you have to do is apply glue on the base and upper side of the board and fit it to the blocks! 

You can find more information with pictures here: http://www.wikihow.com/Build-Simple-Floating-Shelves

# 2

The simplest one (to me) seems to be this one. You will need the same materials - 2 blocks, studs and a wooden board. These shelves are the most suitable for the corners - between two walls.

It is quite simple to install this type of shelf. Get a long block and screw it to the wall - make sure it ends where one of the walls ends. Then get the second block and screw it to the other wall - so this and the first one would touch ends. Place the board on top of them and screw it to the blocks. And that’s it. So simple!

# 3

This is again a very easy way to build a shelf but the difference here is that you can place heavier items on this one.

Follow all the steps in #1. But this time you will need 2 shelf brackets for the two ends of the board(if your board is longer then get 3-4 brackets). Place them under the shelf and screw studs in the holes of the brackets. This is what makes this shelf stronger than #1 and #2.

A little pro-tip - paint the bracket whatever colour your wall is. This way it wouldn’t stand out and spoil the beauty of the shelf.

Regardless of how you choose to build your floating shelf, all of the ways we have explained here, are simple and easy. Pick any size, colour and type of shelf and experiment with it. 

Provided By: Builders Ealing