After finishing the boiler cover, the final part of the utility room puzzle was to get the shelves hung. I’m so delighted with how these acrylic stained shelves turned out. Especially considering they were originally wooden boards from the old walls of the kitchen that had been sitting outside for over a year! Love seeing them reused again! When they were made, the pine was just too yellow for my liking and I remembered a trick Jenny Komenda showed a few years. Using acrylic paint to tone down the colour of the pine and make it look more like oak. It worked perfectly and was cheap and so, so easy. Win, win, win!!
Making the Boards
After the old boards were cut to size, I smothered the edges in wood glue and clamped them together. It was my first time using clamps and they worked brilliantly. As they are clamped, wood glue will spill out of the gap, so make sure to wipe it up immediately as it would look terrible when dried. Let them be for 24hrs before removing the clamps (or follow the directions on your wood glue). After that, give them a really good sanding.
Mixing the Acrylic Paint
Mixing it up took a little bit of experimentation, but I got there in the end! I’ll share my ‘recipe’ but I will say it’s probably best to test it first as your wood might be a slightly different tone. Here’s what worked for me:
- 1 part brown acrylic to 60 parts white paint. Basically I grabbed a weighing scales and put 1g of brown paint with 60g of white paint into a tub.
- Mix really well.
- Add double the amount of water (So for me, it was 120g water)
- Mix again. It takes some time for the water and paint to mix together properly.
Applying the Acrylic Stain
This part is so simple. I just used a sponge to apply it and made sure I swept the sponge from end to end of the board to avoid uneven paintmarks. I ended up letting it dry a few minutes and applying a second coat. You can see from the picture above, the bottom board really does look so much better. Dare I saw oak-like?!
Hanging the Shelves
I attached the acrylic stained shelves using these brackets. They are of really good quality, but they were a little annoying the hang as each hole of the brackets were in slightly different places. It made it a little difficult to hang them in a way that the shelves were perfectly level. Having said that, I think I’d still get them again. I didn’t use the wall plugs sent with the shelves as I just always use the blue Rawl plugs. Habit maybe, but they work on both drywall and concrete. I turned them upside-down so that I could cover the wall bracket with items on the shelves and it would almost like they were floating shelves. I must do a little tweaking still, but so far so good.
The screws were too long for the shelves so I had to use shorter ones. I only had the normal metal ones, so I grabbed a black permanent marker to make them match!
Love the result of this easy DIY! Would you give it a go?