Floating kitchen shelf

  • Here are the hunks of walnut I was given... I turned one into a skateboard rack and the other jus...
  • Every project is an excuse to buy some new tools, so... I decided to pick up a thickness planer t...
  • After sitting in storage for several years the wood got a bit warped and twisted, so I had to get...
  • And we had to make a decision, keep the live-edge or not?
  • To square it up, I cut a couple straight pieces of plywood and tacked them to the sides with roof...
  • After a couple passes through the planer, I started to get a feel for how pretty the grain was.
  • This generated a bit of sawdust... By the time this project was all said and done, this bag was c...
  • The bottom planed up
  • The top planed up
  • My jointer wasn't quite big enough, so I made a little sled for my palm router to square things up
  • Squaring this up with the palm router wasn't fast, but it worked!
  • A quick mockup to see how the size felt... Maybe a little thick.
  • Side view of the mockup with the live edge
  • Ripping down a 3.25" thick, 50lb hunk of walnut on a contractor saw by myself felt a little sketc...
  • Kari puts up with a lot...
  • Routing out a channel to conceal some strip lighting
  • I bored a little container to conceal the annoying hardwired lightstrip coupler ... but I wound u...
  • light strip channel routed...
  • I later realized that the slightly older versions of hue light strips had a coupler that wasn't h...
  • Got the low voltage wire extensions shrink wrapped and ran through the wall...
  • oooo, prettty lights.
  • I bought some epoxy and dark walnut dye for filling the knots and cracks
  • I immediately spilled dye everywhere. It took a long time for this to come off of my hand.
  • Filling some knots and holes with the dyed epoxy.
  • Scraped and sanded down the first layer of epoxy... it needed another layer after this.
  • Filling these big cracks really felt like I was ruining everything
  • Filling a big knot in the front of the shelf... this whole process was new to me and felt so sket...
  • The front knot sanded down.
  • The top cracks and knots all cleaned up
  • When I was almost done with everything, I did the dumbest thing ever and dropped the shelf on it'...
  • To clean up the light strip and distribute the light a bit more uniformly, I also added some alum...
  • Lights mounted... it looks bad from this angle, but the frosted diffuser really helped a ton.
  • Shelf: mounted. Sink: lit.
  • The underside with the lights off
  • How about some blue accent lights...
  • Or maybe some pink accent lights?
  • I probably could've shaved another 1/2" off of the thickness, but overall I think it turned out p...
  • The grain around the live edge is really interesting.
  • It didn't take Kari long to load it up with stuff.
Photos / Projects / Brooks' Dead End Ranch / Floating Kitchen Shelf

5 years ago, I was given a couple big ol hunks of walnut. At the time, I decided to use 1 of them as a skateboard rack, which was admittedly kind of a waste of such a beautiful piece of wood, haha. Then, I just let the other one sit in storage in case we thought of a reason to use it someday. Well, our new kitchen called for a floating shelf, so I decided to give it a shot.

Photos taken from May, 2013 to May, 2018 in Des Moines, Bettendorf, and West Des Moines, Iowa

Album added 6 years ago (May 13, 2018).