A little disclaimer before I begin.
This is in no way, shape or form a floating shelves hanging tutorial. It’s more of a what not to do type of thing.

We put in the wall supports for the desk and large wall to wall shelf without a hitch. So we I thought that the floating shelves would be easy to install, boy was I wrong!

Floating Shelves Fail

I sincerely do not like shelf brackets, they just seem grandma to me (no offense to anyone who likes them). I wanted floating shelves, but I didn’t want to pay the floating shelf price. We got a bunch of shelf inserts for a $1 during our recent trip to IKEA. I don’t think they’re solid wood, but they are good quality and pretty heavy.

I’ve seen them do this on the DIY channel and HGTV a million times, it looked so easy. They hang their wood support on the wall and then attach the shelf to the wood from the top. How hard could it be?

What went wrong:

First off we had a bit of a problem with the desk, we had it measured and cut at Home Depot and did a dry fit. Which went well, the desk fit in perfectly. Ok, so we hung up the supports  I painted the desk with several coats of white paint and a few days passed by.

I’m all excited the desk is finally going in!!! And it doesn’t fit. I don’t understand what happened it fit perfectly before. Could the layers of paint made a difference, maybe the temperature changes in the house caused it to expand, maybe we put it in the wrong way (the walls are uneven). I don’t know.

All I know is not only did it not fit but it actually got stuck. We had to hit it from underneath with a rubber mallet to pry it loose and of course the wall and the desk both got damaged in the process.

We had to cut about 1/4 off the side with the saw while trying not to breathe in the toxic MDF dust.

That did the trick, the desk fit without a millimeter to spare.

Now on to the floating shelves debacle…

We hung the wood supports on the wall, pre-drilled pilot holes on the shelf and inserted the screws half way. Easy as pie, all we had to do now was finish drilling the screws into the supports from above.

Well the space between the screw and the wall was too small so the drill didn’t fit. Ok on to plan B; use a screwdriver. It was incredibly had to finish screwing in the screws and they kept on getting stripped. There was no way.

We ended up removing the whole thing along with the paint from the wall, oops.

The paint on the shelves was also peeling away. Should have used a primer!

We then tried attaching the supports to the shelf before hanging it on the wall. I was so sure that would work.

Nope, there was a huge gap between side support and the wall. So we took it apart again put the side support up first and then attached the rest of the shelf and support. Finally it worked.

A little patching, painting  and a couple of coats of polyurethane and we were done. I was so relieved to see them up. I almost caved in during the project and ran to get some shelf brackets. Almost.

Disregard the ugly floor, it still has to be painted.

Update: I painted the floor, check it out here.

My take away here is that I should have done a bit of research on how to properly hang floating shelves and we would have saved a lot of time and frustration. You live and you learn.

Now I can finally get to the fun part, decorating and organizing the space, yay!