Making a Faux Floating Shelf to Cover a Wire Shelf!

Our laundry room is a hot mess. I have lots of thoughts and ideas on what I want to do with it, but it’s just going to take some free time that I don’t seem to have much of lately! ONE DAY! 😉 Anyways, I wanted to try out a quick and (fairly) simple trick to make a difference.

I hate those wire shelves that most new builders stick in the laundry room. In our old house, we replaced the wire shelf with cabinets. In this house, our laundry room is by our back garage door next to our mudroom, and it’s a high traffic area, so a lot of people see it. I forgot to take a before picture, but I’m sure you can envision exactly what it looked like before- just your plain old regular wire shelf! 😉

I found a great tutorial to building a faux floating shelf to cover wire shelves, and I had to try it! The tutorials I found were for smaller shelves in a linen closet, but I translated it to my longer, single wire shelf in the laundry room.

Here’s what I used:

Supplies:
-1/4” 4×8 foot plywood
-1×4 pine wood (8 foot)
-stain
-wood glue
-metal L-brackets

Steps:
-I measured the width and depth of wire shelf. The width was 78 inches and the depth was 12 inches.

-I measured out the plywood and Stephen made the cut for me using his table saw.

-I sanded the plywood to make it as smooth as possible.

-I cut the 1×4 to the 78″ width of the shelf and stained it and the plywood.

-I put wood glue on the edge of the plywood and stuck the 1×4 on it and clamped it to dry in place. I put the top of the 1×4 meeting the front of the plywood, to hide any seam. I also used 3 L-shaped brackets to keep the 1×4 in place at a 90 degree angle.

We tried to install it, but it was about 1/2 inch too wide… Stephen sanded it with his sander and we tried again…

Woohoo- it worked!

Next up- I’m going to paint the original metal holders black, and somehow organize all our stuff… I’ll post an updated picture once I do that. This is a cheap and easy fix to say “BYE!” to your wire shelf. 🙂