Pots, Pans & Paintbrushes: Ana White DIY Floating Shelves

I love having my finished Etsy art around the house, but I do not love my canvases stacked on my living room mantel, hearth, easel or floor. My inventory is kind of important, so I kind of had to figure out a home for it. Solution? These awesome Ana White DIY floating shelves.

I've had the tutorial on my DIY pin board for a while, but ever since a co-worker of mine made them for her living room, I've been dying to get them on a wall, any wall. I've tried to convince people that they'd be perfect for a kid's room - especially for books - but no one I know has listened to me yet. Well, they may now, now that I have these shelves awesomely displaying my Kitsy Co inventory.

I'm not going to walk you through the project step by step - this Ana White tutorial can do that - but I will show you the highlights of our efforts.

Step 1, of course, was buying all the wood and cutting it down to size. We chose to make three 6-foot shelves so we'd have plenty of space for art.

Next was assembling, which Jeff did so with a kreg jig. No glue involved.

I love love love this tool. It was my favorite part of the project and is my favorite tool ever (I think). I was so excited to buy it, and Jeff was even more excited to use it. You know when your husband is excited about your project, things are good. Ana White shows you in this video tutorial how to use a kreg jig to assemble these shelves. If you don't have one though, you can just use screws or glue.

Shelves assembled - check.

Next was staining. I didn't have to think hard about the color because I just used the stain leftover from our DIY floating mantel project.

Now let's note, even though I used a sponge brush to apply the stain and paper towels to wipe off the excess, I made a sticky mess!

And if you've ever played with stain like I did, you know how awful it is to clean. I thought mineral spirits would remove it, but I didn't have any on hand. So I tried rubbing alcohol... then hydrogen peroxide... then nail polish remover... then, thanks to Jeff's google search, vegetable oil. What? Vegetable oil? It came right off! Put that tip in your back pocket for future reference.

Anyway, to hang the shelves, we had no magic trick. Jeff pre-sinked holes and then simply drilled screws straight through the shelves into the wall. We then filled the holes with stained wood filler plugs.

We did the same for the kreg jig holes on the bottom side, except we filled them first and then stained.

Finding the studs in the wall, marking the drill holes, and leveling and centering the shelves proved most difficult. Long story short, the positioning was off on the pre-sinked drill holes so we had to use sheetrock anchors with the screws to compensate for missing the studs.

The toughest part for me was literally holding up the shelves while Jeff drilled them into the wall. Can that count as a workout? Luckily, we managed, and now we have three perfect shelves that can hold lots and lots of art.