While mythical gf is vacationing out of the country without me because I’m not a teacher and I don’t get entire months off at a time, I decided that I would spend a chunk of my solitude working on my office.
I mean, after a year of living here, it would only make sense that I would have the room where I do the bulk of my artwork and gaming to a point where I’d be able to sit back in my chair and look around and be somewhat satisfied with my immediate surroundings. Nah, as is often times the case in my life, when it comes to the intricate things for myself, I have a tendency to slack on them, putting just about everything else first, like responsibilities.
One of the things I had in mind was that I wanted to have some floating shelves for the vast array of figurines that I’ve amassed throughout the years. Primarily the League of Legends figures that I’d been collecting since they started producing them. They’re pretty good quality, and I can appreciate the consistency and cohesiveness of them as a collection, and I wanted to display them.
The thing is, I was having a great deal of difficulty in finding floating shelves that I was satisfied with. Primarily, I did not want floating shelves with a massive depth, that would fuck with my peripheral vision when I would be sitting at my machine, at the height that I had envisioned setting them up at. Furthermore, floating shelves seem to be a really in thing when it comes to home decorating these days, so the cost of them are most certainly not as cheap as when the first time I came across them years ago at like either a Target or a Container Store.
To make matters worse, the shelves that I once had on the walls of the old house were nowhere to be found anymore; a simple floating shelf with a minimal depth, that would’ve been perfect for Rito figures. In their place were an array of shelves with pretentious bevels and faux-trim accents, with shoddy hardware that were most certainly not very cost effective, nor were they remotely long enough to accommodate all the figures that I have.
Over the last year or so, my brother has gotten really into woodworking. He’s gotten really good at it in that span of time, and he’s made an array of shelves, tables and other practical furniture with his own hands and tools. Needless to say, as all good big brothers do, it inspired me to want to make some practical shit on my own. I figure I’m a pretty meticulous person who has zero fear of working with my hands, I know I have the capabilities to do similar stuff to him, except that I don’t have near the hardware he does at his disposal to do the depth of work that he can.
But making floating shelves? Simple, shallow-depth and of course, simple floating shelves? Oh yeah, I know I could do this at least.
When I say simple, I really mean simple – as in literally a 2×4 piece of lumber mounted to the wall. Except, I wanted true floating shelves, and not like the crap they sell at big box stores, where you have to buy brackets and wall mounts, and then you forever have to compensate for the space of all that extraneous bullshit hardware. Yeah no fuck that, I wanted my floating shelves to look like they were actually floating, and not suspended on crutches protruding from the wall.
That being said, it starts with lumber. Straight, simple lumber. The type of lumber that you can purchase a plank at The Home Depot for like $4.79 for a 2×4 board that’s 96 inches long, and have cut in the store into three equal boards at 32 inches apiece.
Naturally, the lumber itself is a little raw and rugged, and because it’s neigh impossible to get perfectly formed wood, a little bit of legwork would be necessary to smooth it all out, give the edges a slight bevel, and sand off some unruly splinters. And because I’m all for working smarter and not harder (read: lazy), I clamed my planks together so that I could do the beveling in one fell swoop instead of doing it to all three planks separately.
Whereas it might seem like I just slapped some 2×4’s to the wall, it actually is more complex than that. In order to achieve the true floating capabilities, adequate hardware is necessary in order to avoid having shitty brackets or braces to hold them up. I attempted to replicate the hardware of the floating shelves that I find preferable, which is to basically make these internal hooks where screws can catch and be held up by channels in the metal and gravity alone. And the best part is that they’re hidden from plain sight, leading to that all-important floating appearance. So using a Dremel cutting disk, I cut several 1.25” long metal plates, that would be attached to the back of the planks.
The thing is, in order everything to be as flush against the wall as possible, I would have to bore out some channels to compensate for the depth of the plates, as well as the heads of the screws that would attach the plates to the board. I probably should have gone a full quarter inch, but using nothing but a hacksaw and a chisel, I was probably somewhere around like 5/16” or something slightly less. It didn’t really impact the end result, but probably would have made things go a little smoother.
Here’s a shot with the plates attached. Note the large hole in the centers of the plates, to give a little bit of float room for the screws in the wall, but then they fall into the slightly thinner channels at the edge of the circles, when mounted up. Also I painted the planks a basic white using trim paint, and went over them several times by hand with gradually higher grades of sandpaper in order to get a silky smooth finish.
Here’s the first shelf on the wall. It is held entirely by screws anchored to the wall using drywall anchors. It is being held up by nothing but the screws, hooks and gravity. I’m also compulsive about things being level, so I leveled it no less than seven times before thinking it was adequate.
Here’s all the shelves up now. I left nine inches in between each shelf, deeming that an adequate height for the wide variety of figurines that I have and would like to put on display.
Except oops, I have so many Rito figures that they literally took up all available space from the three shelves that I made. There’s a little bit of room expansion, but not much; maybe another two figures, before I have to start really cramming to accommodate for more.
Or, I can just make more shelves. It’s not like I don’t have the wall space for another shelf or two, and these weren’t that difficult to where I couldn’t make more.
If I were to have settled with what was available at The Home Depot or Target, then it would have undoubtedly cost me upwards of $100+ to get as many kits necessary to create space for all my figures; provided they even had shelves long enough in the first place.
However, by making my own shelves, I spent maybe $17 on materials, most of which I wouldn’t have to purchase again if I were to make some more, and just be the cost of lumber, which was under $10. Furthermore, I got the additional sense of satisfaction of knowing that I was dissatisfied with the crap that was available, but instead of allowing myself to be defeated by it, I instead just made what I was hoping to get, myself, and am far happier for it.
