Floating Shelf Plans for Dummies

Floating shelf plans

Considering the sheer volume of DIY woodworking posts written by the "contributors" to the former eHow.com, it certainly shouldn't be a surprise that not all of them were written by people completely familiar with their topic. What is, sadly, unsurprising is that the incompetent freelancers seem to outnumber the competent, and that no one at Demand Media ever put in place a system for checking their work (at least beyond making certain that their posts met the site's style guide). A case in point is the HomeSteady.com post "How to Make Floating Wall Shelves,"¹ dumped out on the mother site by Jake Wayne back in 2014.

Wayne claimed to have gotten his plans from well-known handyman Ron Hazelton, along with a print book (like many an eHow freelancer, it's a safe bet Jake had never seen the book he claimed to have used). Hazelton's plans are clever (and easy): build a frame with an open end, add a "skin" of plywood, and mount the open end over a cleat screwed to the wall studs. They're the same Hazelton plans Beverlee Brick tried to use (with disastrous results).

We'd truly like to think that Wayne read through Ron's plans before he cribbed them or at least watched the video a time or two, but apparently he didn't. Here's why we say that:

• Hazelton's plans included cross bracing inside the shelf to strengthen the ¼-inch plywood skin. Jake wanted you to use, "wooden planks, 1/2 inch by 12 inches by 24 inches." Based on that alone, it's pretty obvious that Wayne didn't know the size of dimensional lumber. Half an inch thick? Twelve inches wide? Use plywood, dumbass!
• Jake's cleat is a "wooden beam, 2 inches by 2 inches by 22 inches" – more problems with dimensional lumber, as well as eHow's moronic insistence on calling a 2-by-2 a "beam"! More to the point, he instructs his reader to leave a 2-inch space for this "beam" when used as a cleat. But Jake: a 2-by-2 is 1½" wide!
• Jake's top and bottom "planks" are half an inch longer than the constructed frame... again, because of dimensional lumber measurements.

• Hazelton finished the exposed edges with solid lumber, mitered on the corners. Jake? left it looking sloppy.
• Hazelton cut the cleat shorter than the shelf to allow "wiggle room," Jake cut it exactly the same length. 

There: a freelancer who attempted to crib plans for a floating shelf from a video and still couldn't get it right, mostly because our Dumbass of the Day had no useful knowledge of carpentry, lumber, and woodworking.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7711914_make-floating-wall-shelves.html

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