Shallow Open Shelves in Dining Room

My last post was about a trip to an antique store where I liked so many things, but undoubtedly  the one thing that got me the most was a set of amazing shelves with gigantic corbels, you can check them out right HERE.

Since I painted those two chairs in the dining room, I've been sprucing up the room a little bit,  you can see how the "new" chairs don't fit quite well in the room, and now with the new idea of easy shelves, I found the perfect spots to install some of them.  Well, they were not going to be as big or with those beautiful corbels as the ones I saw.

But they will visually fill up those spaces.  I took my measurements, drawing lines on the places were I like them to be, and most importantly marking pretty well the STUDS LOCATION.

I don't have too much room in there, the shelves had to be very shallow.  The material I used was remnants of 1 x 4 used to trim the windows (left picture below),   I also use the aprons that were taken off from the window skirts the builder had installed on those windows (right picture below).

This is how they were going to be installed.

Pocket holes were driven to each 1 x 4 board-shelf, making sure they were aligned to the location of the studs on the wall.  I didn't want to see hardware around the shelves.

I had aprons for six shelves, but I was thinking of installing ten.  So, for two shelves another remnant piece of molding was used and for the final two shelves I decided to create some corbels (hmm still thinking about the pretty ones in that store),  the only thing was my corbels were going to be very small.

Again, the material was 1 x 4, making a rough drawing of the corbels on it, and cutting the shape out with a jigsaw, two at a time.

All the material was ready, but before installing them, and knowing my measurements pretty well, I decided to first give the whole room a new coat of paint.  Using left over paint from other projects a new shade was created.

The room was painted, at first it looked too "bluish", but I stuck to it, anyways I didn't want to paint again.

The shelves were nailed together - shelf and apron-  with 1¼" nails, before installing them on the wall.

Then, the shelves were attached to the studs on the wall.

Using 2½" pocket-hole screws to reach well into those studs.

The top two shelves were attached to the wall driving the screws from the top, for the three lower shelves the screws were driven on the bottom of the shelves to conceal the holes, as you can see in the picture below.

These shelves are shallow, only 3½" deep, I'm not going to use them to store heavy items, their use is mostly decorative to fill that empty space.   If I change my mind I simply unscrew them and they are off.  I didn't use glue, not even caulking around them to cover the gaps.

The only thing needed was to shop around the house for items to be displayed on them.

Remember the LOVE sign?  HERE is the tutorial on how to do it.  One of the kitchen cupboards got a very welcome free space after taking some items from there too.

Now the blue walls don't look that "bluish", those empty spaces are filled and I'm loving it.  Join me next time for a mini dining room reveal.

See you then!