The stronger the anchor you use, the more stable your shelves will be – and of course if they’re not placed perfectly level into the wall, they might wobble. As opposed to the longer shelves, which are screwed into place pretty firmly in three places each, these can also be popped on and off easily, which is awesome because we’ll temporarily remove these guys when it’s cabinet painting time. We just used heavy duty anchors driven into the pre-selected spots on the wall that aligned with where we wanted to hang each shelf. We repeated that process for the higher shelf, and when it came to the little side shelves, those were really easy. … so I broke out the power drill to drive those in a lot faster.
That was for the birds (took a million years)… At first I did it by hand, all allen-wrench-style. Then you just slide the shelf onto the brace and tighten the three provided screws that go into the three pre-drilled holes in the shelves.
There are these little metal plates that you use when you drive the screw into the stud (they’re sort of like washers, they go under the screw and hold the brace even more firmly than a screw alone could), so those three metal rectangles that you see below are where two went into studs (we also added one more with an anchor for even more holding power). That freed up my hands so I could use the stud finder to find the actual studs, and drive two more nice long screws (provided with the shelves) into the studs on that wall, so it was held up really strongly (John aided me by holding the level to be sure it didn’t tweak up or down on a certain side as I went). I just measured in a few inches on each side from our little pencil corner guides since the metal brace doesn’t run as long as the shelves themselves) and I used one screw into the drywall right in the middle, just to hold the brace in place.
Next I placed the brace along the horizontal area where we wanted to hang the shelf. The instructions show a few recommended screw-to-stud placements. It has a bunch of holes all along it so you can just find a stud (we used a basic stud finder) and screw into at least two of those along the span of the shelf, so you know it’s extra secure. The metal brace is actually pretty smart. These longer shelves come with a metal hanging brace and screw, so when you open things up, this is what you’re dealing with. … before marking the top corners on each side and drawing a line across the top, like you see below. We just spaced the height of the second shelf by eye and chose 14″ above the other shelf, which gave us enough room to load up the bottom shelf without things feeling cramped, but also allows a shorty like me to easily reach items on that top shelf.Īs for actually hanging them, we held up the bottom shelf in place and made sure it was level… The pre-made sizes allowed for a couple inches of breathing room around the window too, which we liked anyways. When it comes to how we hung them (they’re lack shelves from Ikea), we decided to line the bottom shelf up with the cabinet on the left of the shot above (18″ above the counter) so that they all related to one another. These pictures don’t even do it justice – it’s literally at least twice as bright and feels a lot bigger and more open as well. Here’s how it looked a few weeks ago after we removed the wallpaper.Īnd here it is from the same POV now, after removing the cabinets, re-hanging the crown molding, patching/priming/painting the walls, trim, and ceilings, upgrading the lighting, and hanging those new shelves of ours. We still have a few major things on the list (like painting those cabinets) but the shelves make such a gigantic difference as opposed to the dark cabinetry that used to hang on either side of that window. The no-Beyonce consolation prize is that we finally got the Ikea floating shelves up in the kitchen, and it suddenly feels like we’re turning a corner. If only we had Beyonce around to photobomb them, they’d be the best shelfies ever…
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