Floating Shelves

What do you think of floating shelves? I think they look modern, clean and simple.  And, because they don't sit on the floor, you never have to move them to clean behind them (I do what I can do support my lazy lifestyle!!!)!  

Check out how they can look in a kitchen...


                                         Apartment Therapy


Or a family lounge area.......


                                         Decor Pad

They really could be used in any room of a house.  At least, that's what we think.  Since our recent basement mini-makeover, which I talked about here, we've been talking about moving our books from our hall closet to the area beside the woodstove in the basement.  I think books add to the cozy factor in a space, and we love the idea of having them easily accessible when we're cozying up by the woodstove. I've had my eyes open for bookshelves at local thrift stores and kijiji, but haven't found any that fit our style and budget (veeeerrrrrrry cheap!).

Then I remembered something I'd seen done a long time ago in blogland somewhere.  Why not build floating shelves out of wooden hollow-core interior doors?!??!  By the time you could say "hollow-core doors - whaaaat??" we were back from the Steinbach MCC with two lovely doors for a grand total of $10.  I apologize for the lack of "in progress" pics - we got a little carried away with the project and snapped zilch-o pictures....

Here is the space we were planning to put the shelving (please excuse the horrific lighting - I forgot to adjust the camera settings)....

We (as in Jeff) cut down a 2" x 4" we had laying around in the shop, to make it narrow enough to fit inside a hollow-core door.  He then screwed it securely to the studs on the wall.   We decided we wanted the shelves to be approximately 12" deep, so he cut the door down to our desired width.   Then, it was just a matter of sliding the open/cut side of the door over the strip of wood on the wall, and screwing it in place.  Our kids helped paint it, using leftover paint from the basement.  Here is the after:

And here it is with a few things haphazardly thrown onto it....

So there you have it.....this is what we do for kicks around here.....