DIY Shelves In the Bathroom

Happy Monday, everyone! Let’s make this a productive one, filled with enthusiasm for what this week has in store, shall we?

Orrrr should we just aim for survival? 🙂

Today marks a really fun bit of progress in our hall bathroom saga and I couldn’t believe how easy the project was from start to finish, given that there was a bit of building involved. To reminisce, let’s do a quick review of where we left off with this space. After coming up with the vision for the room, painting it a cool gray/blue, and adding a DIY whitewashed mirror, we left things looking like this…

Over the toilet, there used to be a medicine cabinet. Nothing crazy, just an oak wood cabinet with a few shelves for things and some doors to hide the mess.

However, we’ve come to realize that we don’t really use medicine cabinets to their full potential. We had one in the downstairs bathroom of the last house that had NOT ONE THING in it from the time we moved in to the time we moved out. What a wasted opportunity. 🙂

So, this time around, I thought it would be neat to try something different in that above-the-toilet space. Enter… SHELVES! As blah as we feel about medicine cabinets, we do enjoy a good shelf, as proven by the many we installed in our last house (just click on the pictures below to see each of those posts)…

In the kitchen…

In the downstairs bathroom (we later took these down, but used them for awhile for seasonal nic nacks)…

In the family room (one of my favorite projects of that whole house)…

In the office…

In the laundry room…

Yeah, you get the picture. 🙂 We love a good shelf. So why not try a few in the hall bath?

These ones were pretty simple to build. All it took were two brackets per shelf and a piece of scrap wood to make the actual ledge. I found the brackets at Ikea for $5 each… they’re called Ekby Valter and come in black and birch. I went for the black in the hopes that they will tie nicely in with the oil rubbed bronze hardware we have in store for this space.

As for the wood, big box stores like Home Depot and Lowes often have a scrap pile for dirt cheap that you can pick through and purchase. I wasn’t having any luck this time around until I walked into our garage. Which looks like this…

…and saw THIS in the far corner, tucked behind all sorts of furniture, odds and ends that need to be sorted through and thrown out, and a whole slew of cobwebs. See it back there?

TREASURE. This was left over from the last owner and it just so happened to be exactly the size we needed for the shelves!

After cutting them to size (I think ours are about 24″ long and 8″ deep) and sanding them down, all I did to finish them off was add a coat of Polyurethane Matte sealer. I didn’t use any stain because I really liked the look of the wood as is, but the sealer does help to bring out natural tones and protect the pieces from any potential damage. You can see the difference of the unsealed (on the left) vs. the sealed (on the right) wood in this shot… just check out how warm and rich that sealed piece looks!

Now, all that’s left is installation! The brackets went in first… to figure out the spacing and height, I used some painters tape and just fooled around with it until I had a look that I liked. Here’s a tip: To help visualize how high to hang and how much space you want between them, try holding up various things that you might want to display on the shelves against the tape lines. This will tell you if those items are going to fit within and/or look right in that set up.

Installing the brackets is pretty simple… hold up the bracket (check to see if it’s straight with a level!), use a tiny drill bit to drill through the holes and mark where you’ll be working on the wall, take the bracket down and use the holes to put molly bolts into the wall (unless you’re able to drill right into a stud), hold the brackets back up, line up the holes with the holes in the wall, and add screws to secure them in place. Bam, installed. 🙂

After that, all it takes is adding the board on top, attaching it to the bracket with a few screws up from the bottom, and that’s it! The “hard” part is over… now all that’s left is making them look pretty. My favorite part! I just plopped a few frames and nic nacks on them, but even just that quick set up completely changes the look of the room. It’s amazing what a bit of personality can do for a space!

And we’re just getting started because in the next post, we are going to show you THREE WAYS to style a shelf to achieve three completely different looks! Helping us out is a company called Southern Glen, an artisan boutique in South Carolina that has the most charming selection of beautiful things. Not only do we get to play around with some of their goods, but they are also hosting a giveaway for a lucky reader to win a few for themselves AND giving us an exclusive “OTF” promo code to share with you, should you want to take a gander through their online store. So stay tuned because this shelf adventure is just beginning! 🙂