Open shelving in the kitchen

Everyone needs more kitchen storage. Our kitchen has built-in cabinets, a freestanding china cabinet, an Ikea island, and a pantry, but it wasn’t enough. So we decided to use our last open expanse of wall to hang some shelves. It was a straightforward project that gave us extra horizontal surfaces and looked good, too. I’ll explain the choices that we made so you can figure out what would work best for you.

The first step was to choose the shelving itself. I wanted to use real wood because the shelf ends would be visible. By contrast, I used particle board with wood veneer for some of our pantry shelves, which would have their ends up against the wall.

So what kind of wood? I did some research to try to figure out what wood is considered fashionable, but I concluded that strong trends simply don’t exist in the way that they do for, say, couches. Wood is often going to seem a little dated, or timeless, depending on how you look at it. I’d say very dark finishes are out of style, but other than that people are doing a lot of different things.

We already have older oak trim in our house, the kind that some people find too orange but that doesn’t bother us too much. Our butcher block island also has an oak top that we like quite a bit. So we went with oak.

Now for the sizing. The deeper the shelf, the more storage it provides, but also the more it juts out into the kitchen. We had the idea of putting our cookbooks on the shelf, so we wanted it to be at least as deep as the largest cookbook. I settled on 12 inches deep as a good measure. Whatever depth you pick, you’ll likely be able to find boards around that size, so you won’t need a table saw to rip them.

I was ready to pick out some 1 x 12 oak boards, but at the last minute I happened to see a special offer at Menards: 4-foot butcher block oak shelves for $15 each. As it happened, that size fit our space well and the butcher block style matched the island. Perfect!

I did have to look through a dozen or more of the shelves to find two that were not warped or otherwise unsuitable. In general, I never grab the first boards off the top — I always look them over before I buy. Also I bought one extra shelf, just in case, that I returned after the project was done.

I sanded the shelves by hand with 100-grit sandpaper, followed by 220. I could have gone with even finer sandpaper but I didn’t need a mirror finish. One tip I learned for this project is to sand the end grain with finer sandpaper than the rest, so I went up to 320 on the ends.

Now that we’d picked the wood, we had to decide on a finish. I purchased a lot of different stains (probably too many) to try out, in the smallest cans possible. I also bought a 1 x 3 oak board to test the stain colors so that I didn’t have to experiment on my actual shelves. Here again, I tried to figure out what was trendy, but in the end we chose Minwax Golden Oak because it came closest to matching the butcher block island. I did two coats of that stain and then three coats of Minwax satin finish polyurethane on top.

Next we had to choose the brackets. Floating shelves, which conceal the wall attachments, are popular right now, but it felt like a more complicated project to make that kind of shelf in a way that would be strong enough to hold cookbooks. And the brackets themselves can have their own aesthetic appeal.

A lot of brackets have a farmhouse or industrial look, but that didn’t really match our kitchen. So we picked some simple brackets with diagonal supports ($34 for a 12-pack). I chose a size about two inches shorter than the depth of the shelf.

I wanted to use enough brackets to make the shelves strong (I weighed my cookbooks ahead of time on the bathroom scale) but I didn’t want to overdo it. I ended up using one bracket on each end and one in the middle.

Ideally these brackets should be screwed into studs. Of course the studs didn’t line up conveniently with where I wanted the brackets, so I decided to find at least one stud I could use and then put in drywall anchors for the other brackets. This process worked pretty well, though it’s slow going to try to see inside walls, even with my excellent magnetic stud finder. I did have to do a little wall patching to fix some mistakes from this stage.

There’s no standard height to hang the shelves. In my case, I checked that I could reach the upper shelf without using a step stool. And I went back again to the cookbooks and measured the tallest one to make sure that it would fit in the space between the shelves. I decided to hang two shelves with 14 inches between them.

After attaching the brackets to the wall, I was ready to put the shelves on top. I marked the bracket holes on the underside of the boards and then carefully drilled pilot holes. This is an important step because oak is a hard wood that can split if you put a screw directly into it. Don’t ruin your wood right at the end!

The tricky part is to drill only partway through the shelf, then stop before the drill bit pokes through the other side. I wrapped a small piece of painter’s tape around my bit at the depth that I wanted the pilot hole. When the bit got to the tape, I knew that was far enough. By the way, I also used painter’s tape to protect the parts of the brackets that I might bump with the drill bit while attaching them to the wall. Even though I’m often tired and in a hurry at the end of a project, a little extra caution with the last steps is worth it.

Once the shelves were attached, it was time to load them up. They got filled fast!