Creating a Home: Urban Jungle Living Room Makeover

Kait Welch, one of our partners, is sharing her floating shelves project with you. Read on for excerpts of her story, which can be found in its entirety on her site, Modern Hippie Habits.

RUSTIC5WM-01B Floating Shelf helps add style and function

RUSTIC5WM-01B Floating Shelf helps add style and function

“With the paint finished in the living room, it was time to figure out what I needed to do to make the space feel like home. In the few years that I’ve lived in this house I’ve slowly collected furniture that I love. Most of my favorite pieces, like my dining table, my beautiful mid-century modern chair, and lamps are all from world market. Their dark wood and moody colors make me happy and I knew I wanted to play off of that.

So I needed shelving to ‘match.’ I was reached out to by Ornamental Moulding and Millwork and they offered to send over some shelves that could be used as either floating shelves or fireplace mantels and I immediately fell in love!

A80B87B4-CDCE-4054-9CF8-1CE4A757D038-scaled.jpg

The natural maple wood shelves with iron accents were beautiful on their own, but I made the (VERY HARD!) decision to stain them to match the dark wood in my furniture. I went with Dark Walnut by Varathane for a single coat and was SO pleased with how the color turned out!

It was finally time for staining! These shelves were so easy to put up with their included cleat that I secured them into studs and mounted them on the wall all on my own - you can’t get better than that!

I popped my geometric diamond shelf on the wall, re-hung my geometric planters (I have both ceramic and glass planters), and was ready to style the living room! It was super fun zooming around the house collecting things that I wanted to display. Plants, crystals, a few teapots from my collection - these shelves showcase some of my very favorite things!

If you are curious to watch the whole process, I chronicled it on my YouTube channel where you can see the step-by-step details!”


See something you like? Learn more about these floating shelves and check out our step by step video on how to install these in any room of your home.