DIY Mini Shelf

When Lily started school, I felt like we needed a place to hang her backpack and lunch box.  I made it my mission to find the perfect holder.  I finally found one with five hooks at TJ Maxx and hung it up in a spot where I thought was convenient (at the bottom of the stairs).  It will also double as our stocking holder during Christmas time!

Once I hung the hooks, I thought the wall above looked a little bare. My husband teases me saying that I want to cover every square inch of wall space just for the heck of it, but I really wanted a shelf!  I was envisioning a pop of green somewhere on the wall, so I needed a shelf to hold a fake plant. 

Maybe it's true.  Maybe I will hate my style ten years down the road. But right now, I'm loving the farmhouse look. I don't want everything to be whitewashed or tattered looking, but I like a little bit of the distressed look.  So I designed a shelf to fit the exact space I wanted to fill and went with a bright white followed by a natural wax seal to get more of the whitewashed look. 

Here's what went down.

First, I found some scrap wood in the garage.  Mike has a pile left over from various projects, like making shelves for the pantry or a closet for the down stairs bathroom. Next, I used the chop saw to cut triangles to use as corbels for underneath the shelf part.

After cutting the boards, I dusted off the router.  I hadn't used it in a while, so I had to refresh my memory on how everything worked!  After a few practice cuts, I ended up just using a super simple shave to make rounded corners and edges.

Once the corners and edges were all rounded, I cut the corbels into a shape that I traced myself.  It wasn't perfect by any means, but I like to "wing" and "eye" things.  I think it slightly irritates my engineer hubby, haha. After tracing them with paper, I used a scroll saw to make the wavy cuts.  The wood was a little thick for this project, but it worked.

After this step, I got really into making the shelf and totally forgot to snap pictures!  Mike helped me attach the corbels to the shelf/ledge part. Then I got to work staining, painting, sanding, painting again, then waxing.  Lastly, I attached these little teeth hooks I had in a picture hanging pack. Voila!  I really like how it turned out!  The green pop is exactly what I wanted :)