Pinterest Shelves

After wrapping up my youngest daughters' bedroom remodel, I kept seeing these floating shelves in a zigzag pattern all over pinterest. It looked like an interesting challenge as a woodworker, and we had to lose a cabinet in the bedroom so my Evil Genius needed a new place to display her collection of rubber ducks.

I started by grabbing a 4' level and a pencil. I drew lines on the wall to establish the pattern around the existing furniture, then measured the lines so I knew how much wood to buy. She said she wanted nicer stained lumber instead of painted pine, so when I bought the cypress for the daybed, I also bought (3) 12' boards of red oak. Of course, when they came through the planer one of them turned out not to be oak at all, so I had to dress a 4th board to get the 36' of lumber that I needed.

Assuming you can see the lines for the left side of the zigzag

And here is the right side

 If you can't see those lines drawn onto the wall, sorry. Pink walls aren't the easiest thing to show linework. Trust me, it's going to be cool.

To make the shelves, I'm started by cutting the boards to length, then ripping them to about a 5" width. From there I ripped a 1" strip off of one side that I wanted to put against the wall. My plan is to mark the studs on the inside of the 1" strip, then use draw-tite screws to anchor the strips to the wall. Then add 1/2" holes for 1/2" dowels into both the strip and the main shelf to align and support the weight. These things only have to hold rubber ducks, not books haha

To finish the shelves, I ran them through the planer & tablesaw to shape, then belt sanded with 80 & 120 grit, random orbit sander 180 grit, hand sanding 220 grit. Then I brushed on a glossy polyurethane, 2 coats per side. I didn't seal the edges that go inside the joint or against the wall, but that poly really makes the grain shine!

Getting stained, and you can see the holes drilled into the strip

This is just the left side shelves

Finished sealing

First strip is attached

I'm happy this is coming together

These are all of the strips it took for the left hand shelves

attaching the wide parts

The left side is complete

These turned out pretty cool. I needed to make the holes in the edge of the boards much deeper than I originally thought. This section only took 1 of the 3 boards that I bought, so the right hand side will be twice this much work. It took a lot more glue between the strips and the boards than I was expecting. I'm still kind of suspect about how much weight these can hold, but we'll see. EG loves them so far.