Budget DIY Rustic Industrial Shelving…say that 5 times fast! What a mouth full – but I felt like I couldn’t leave any particular word out or it wouldn’t encapsulate them well. If you have been following me in previous posts, you know that my husband and I are recent and proud home owners and loving the freedom to decorate and style our home however we want without renter restrictions! Slowly but surely we add new things here and there. Our newest add are shelves we used to have in baby girl’s room but they don’t really have a good spot anymore so we changed up the brackets to fit our dining room decor and I am so excited to share the deal we got and how DIY easy they are.
Not that we are in any way ahead of Joanna Gaines on decorating style, but we swear we bought these shelf brackets before we saw them on Fixer Upper episodes. So needless to say we were proud to share her taste when we did see. I will say, these brackets are expensive on most Etsy shops and being new frugal home owners, we couldn’t rationalize spending close to $80 on shelf brackets. But somehow I stumbled across a shop with far more affordable metal brackets and we got all 4 custom size brackets for less than $30 on Etsy.
We already had the cedar wood from the previous shelves so it felt like not cost there – but they were cheap to begin with. It was a long cedar board from Home Depot that we had cut down in to two 26″ pieces and still we have big piece left over. Never know when you will need another pretty cedar board – always nice to have around. We decided not to stain them or poly them because we loved the raw look of them as is!
The Materials:
Forged Iron Shelf Brackets
(7.5″ in depth with 4″ drop)
Cedar boards
(26″ long, 7″ deep, 1.5″ thick)
And this is essentially how the brackets fit onto the boards – but keep in mind this view is upside down.
Stud-Finder
Black screws and Drywall anchors (only photographed anchors as they are more uncommon – screws are pretty self explanatory)
These drywall anchors are a life saver when the builder 40 years ago didn’t cooperate and didn’t put studs centered along the wall so you can easily hang heavy shelves! Wink wink – just kidding! But we really didn’t have 2 studs centered appropriately on the wall so we had to improvise.
Speaking of the wall – here is a quick before shot of the blank wall next to our favorite other decor piece in the house…our restored hoosier cabinet! Click here if you’d like to see how we restored it step by step!
I will say it took us awhile to decide on the exact wall to put the shelves on. We knew it would be somewhere around our lovely restored hoosier cabinet. We decided on the bare wall adjacent to the right – perfect size for the shelf width and you can see it when you walk in the house and from the living room! Perfection!
The Step by Step:
When hanging shelves that begin with a heavy board and then you also plan to put decor on them, try to always find a studs to work around in the wall. I recommend a stud finder like this one that senses the density in the wall and turns red and beeps as your run it along the wall once a stud is detected.
But in our case, we had to center the shelving and where the studs fell in the wall – it just didn’t work. So in this case the solution was drywall anchors and with the brackets having two screw holes on each base, it really secured it quite well.
To figure out the height of the shelves and space between, you really need help! This is not a 1 person job – but luckily my hubby and I love doing projects together so we decided on the top shelf height first and marked the bracket screw holes approximately where we wanted them to sit on the boards – about 3″ from the edge of the board and 9″ from the wall edge.
Then he pre-drilled the holes and I hammered in the drywall screws. Not the best photo below – I know! But we were doing this at night and I had to snap a photo of these in the wall so you all could see what they look like installed. Essentially, it is just an added support in the wall that the screw goes into…you will never see it again once the shelf is installed.
We then grabbed the bracket and lined the holes up with drywall anchors, leveled the bracket with our handy mini-level and while I held the bracket in place, he screwed in the 2 matching black screws. And repeat 3 more times to finish out top shelf and then bottom shelf.
Then you just set the boards on top centered on the brackets and screw in a short screw underneath at designated hole to secure them in place. Repeat for both shelves.
Styling Process:
Then to style the shelves…the even more fun part! We had a few things already we were excited to use but we had to do some bargain shopping to find
some other fun pieces.
So the blank slate before me…
I am not an interior designer but decorating shelves can be tricky and I learned with these that is all about depth on the shelf. I didn’t want everything to be the same type of 3-D object that sits at the middle of the shelf on both shelves. I gathered some inspiration from fellow designers out there and decided to begin with some empty frames. I found a couple not being used in our “frames Rubbermaid”. I took some white paint to them and sanded it off a little and viola – some easy shabby chic frames.
Then I began placing my other objects on and some in front of the frames because they aren’t to be the focal – just a good background to create that depth.
We love vintage books! So we added these two books with a metallic chipped votive holder turned vase for some greenery. I think adding some plant (faux or real) to shelves makes them more lively.
The green mason jar is vintage piece my mom found at their recycling center – score!
The round orb piece is so fun! Not really sure what its’ intended purpose should be but I loved it and liked that it would serve just as decor! Thank you Marshall’s!
The watering can is a fun farmhouse piece we snatched up at our favorite annual Vintage Fest hear in St. Louis.
Naturally by the watering can you need something that could maybe seem like it would be watered so we snagged this cute mini mason jar from a garage sale up the street for $1 and I made some fun creme colored faux billy ball/allium combination floral out of yarn and glued them to sticks for an outdoorsy touch.
See this video tutorial – my favorite one out there and how I learned to make them!
The clock was the last piece. We’d been wanting a clock somewhere and we can see it from living room but still discrete and vintage – so duh! It was perfect!
I usually am hard on myself decorating wise – it is hard for me to be satisfied with an end result of anything fully. But I am so very excited about these shelves and the style they took on as I found pieces we already had and some cheap extras to add to it! The dimension and flair it adds to the corner of our dining room is just what I hoped for!
A few more snap shots below just – a little before and after action!
