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We did a little decorating this weekend with our almost finished bathroom makeover by creating these awesome, and easy industrial farmhouse shelves. When I say easy, I honestly didn’t know how easy this project was going to be and if I would have known then I would have done it a lot sooner than this! Y’all these industrial farmhouse shelves are EASY! Like on a scale of 1-10 these are like a 1 or 2.
We did these shelves in an afternoon, while also painting part of the fence with the new paint sprayer (many more posts to come from using that bad boy), stripping paint off of a beautiful hardwood door and fixing our work table that had lost a part making it inoperable. So our ADD may have been on overdrive or possibly I was a little ambitious to get a few things crossed off the to-do list, but we managed to get quite a bit done in a very short amount of time!
So for a while now I have been struggling with how to decorate this vintage farmhouse because there is literally no wall space to decorate with. We have tons of windows, which I love, but there just isn’t a lot of wall space for decorating and I feel that is what is missing in order to make this house a home. So while perusing Pinterest after church on Sunday I came across a picture of some industrial wood shelves. After making a quick supply list and dashing off to Lowes, we gathered the supplies and headed home to get started!
Supplies needed for two industrial farmhouse shelves:
- 1x8x6 board cut into two 18” pieces
(4) Metal flanges
(4) Metal pipes (we used ones that were individually packaged that were 10” long)
(4) Metal pipe cap
(1) Foam paintbrush
(1) Bottle of Hammered Spray Paint
Drill
Level
Pencils for marking holes (unless you are really really good at eyeballing things)
First, we laid a paint cloth down on our workbench and set up the paint triangles. Side note, we use these paint triangles all the time because they make painting all sides of something so easy because it puts the item up on the painting surface! We didn’t put the long pipes on the cones, they stood up on their own.
Next, we sprayed all the pieces with a coat of the hammered paint and allowed them to dry. While drying we cut our 1×8 into our two 18” boards. We marked the board with a Stanley square to ensure a straight cut with our GMC chop saw.
We laid our boards on four paint cones and stained the boards on all sides. Because it was a cooler day it took a long time for the boards to dry. Way too long for my patience!
We marked the wall where we wanted the shelves. Because we know that there is wood behind the entire wall in this room we did not need to worry with anchors or finding studs to drill into. But if you will need to find the studs or use anchors if you don’t have wood behind your walls like we do. We probably double and triple checked our measurements to make sure that the flanges were going to be level and equally spaced both vertically and horizontally. Honestly, I was terrified of messing this step up because we were drilling on our newly installed ship lap wall and I knew that the repercussions were going to be massive if I missed a measurement! There were a lot of heated moments during this step! I didn’t help that when I was finally ready to drill the first screw into the wall that the battery on the drill was dead!
So after 16 screws and lots and lots of checking for the level we were done with the hard part. Next, we twisted on the metal pipes and caps! We grabbed the mostly dry boards and placed them on the “brackets” and wall-lah we were done! Then I tore the house up looking for cute items to place on these new shelves and found a few things. But I don’t think that this will be the end result of the decorating but it worked for today!
All in all, these shelves took no more than about 20 minutes to complete, drying time of the wood was probably more like an hour and a half. But I think these shelves make all the difference to the bathroom. Since this is the only full bath and the bathroom guests would use when visiting us it is important to me that it look special. The original image that I used for my inspiration called for two inch thick boards, which I think would look really nice but because this is such a small bathroom I felt like it would overpower the room so we used the thinner one-inch boards.