Office Floating Shelves

It’s been a minute since I’ve done a house update and wow have we been doing some house-updating! We decided like very sane and well-planned people to try to knock out three of our biggest projects in the two weeks before my family came to visit. Yep. One of them was this little office schmooze. We are always in need of shelf space for more books (this is where you pretend to be surprised) and I’d designed these floating shelves over our desks to solve that functional issue as well as have a little flair: they look like piano keys! Beveled and everything. I’m very happy with how they turned out and now I just need Camille to come over and style them for me. It’ll be a fresh challenge for her because these books are more like pantry staples: I’ll be using them and moving them around all the time as I’ve entered the writing phase (cue giant restaurant gong sound) of this Ph.D. journey.

Let’s be very clear: I may have designed the shelves and built the bases, which you can see Jackson installing onto the wall below, but I would not ever have been able to do this project on my own. Not even with two of me. I needed Jackson. These shelves are HEAVY. They’re built to last, cut from the last remaining two by fours we have from taking out the wall (the former fourth bedroom, which no one needs in a 1522 square foot home). I could barely hold them up to the wall. I certainly didn’t have the strength to press them flush to the wall, then grab a drill and push that at a 90 degree angle to the board. Yikes. In, yes, sadly classic Emma fashion, I got 60% of the way into this project and then had to grovel like a child who can’t reach the top shelf. Also, I cannot reach the top shelves in our home. Jackson graciously rescued me and did the massively effortful part of getting these up… then decided he really wanted to see it all the way through and enjoyed using the cute little clamps and the wood glue and the nail gun and voila! We had some finished floating shelves.

We moved a few things around in this room and as you can tell, these iPhone photos are on par quality wise for how finished this room is. HD pics headed your way when the new desks, zebra rug, and roarschach prints are all in place.

What'cha think?

em