Hi, I’m Annie, and I’m intimidated by open shelving. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t. I’m a minimalist to the core, almost to a fault, and I had the impression that open shelves meant clutter and mess. Just recently, after building these industrial pipe shelves, I’ve changed my mind!
Pros of Industrial Pipe Shelves
Open shelving is BEAUTIFUL and is a way for you to show your personality through decorating. I wish we had come to this realization when renovating our kitchen, but it’s not too late for the rest of our house.
When it comes to decorating, I am so indecisive. I love so many different styles. When trying to visualize what I want to do with a space, a slideshow plays in my head of all the amazing inspiration I’ve recently seen. This could be a good thing, as opposed to not knowing what to do with a space (which believe me, also happens). The problem is, with so many ideas coming at me, nothing seems obviously “right”, and I end up wasting WAY too many hours going back and forth.
After I finally make a decision, I usually have to go back to the drawing board because I mostly fall in love with the most expensive options out there.
These shelves were no different. We fell in love with the look of custom iron brackets that hang from the ceiling and take up the majority of the wall. The iron brackets alone would cost between $500-$1000. That kind of spending wasn’t in the cards for us, so we went back to research.
Industrial Pipe Shelves: Brackets
We found these industrial pipe brackets on Amazon for a small fraction of the price. For this project, we spent about $200 total (including the pipe brackets, wood, and paint).
We learned pretty quickly that going with the industrial pipes would be more cost-effective, but it still took a while to narrow it down to the specific ones. We chose these brackets on Amazon because the price was competitive with the lowest price we’d seen, and the reviews were great.
Note: The brackets that I used are currently out of stock, but these industrial pipe brackets look similar, with a similar price point and good reviews.
When they arrived, the brackets were a charcoal/silver color. They were supposed to look like pipes, so that makes sense. But I ended up spray painting them black (linked here) to give them a slightly more modern vibe.
All the individual pieces screwed together easily, and they allowed for some variation if you wanted to change up height in any way. The next step was finding the studs in the wall because the studs dictated where the brackets had to go. With this much weight and surface area, you don’t want to rely on drywall anchors.
We chose to leave a large space between the two sets of industrial pipe shelves with the hope that we’d find something cool to put on the wall in between. Then Joe just measured and marked, and the brackets were up!
Industrial Pipe Shelves: Shelves
The next step was figuring out what we wanted the wood shelves to look like. We couldn’t decide between light, medium, or dark. As I was debating what to do, a woman reached out and suggested doing multiple sets. Genius!
I knew I wanted one set to be black and another to be natural wood. Why stop there? We decided to add a third option stained to match our buffet. I absolutely love the idea of having the ability to swap them out to refresh the space throughout the year. This is possible since the wood pieces lay right on top of the brackets, and are not screwed in.
Super easy, or so I thought. It took so long to sand, stain, and paint these shelves. Oops!
I did not expect issues with the wood accepting the stain. I thought the hard part would be deciding on the size and stain color. That was the easy part.
We got all of our wood from Home Depot, but different pieces of wood (even from the same species) absorbed the stain differently. Different cans of the same stain looked totally different. Apparently, the temperature can even have an impact. This made it really difficult to get 8 identical-looking shelves.
Don’t let this scare you, but you may need to adjust if needed. I used Lime Wax on the stained shelves because it helped to hide some of these imperfections.
Black Shelves
For the set of black shelves, we used 1×10 pine, and we cut the shelves with 1″ overhang on each side (the above photo is before we cut the shelves to size). I used the same black spray paint that I used to spray the pipes. I went through multiple cans, so it would’ve been much smarter to use regular paint.
Stained Shelves
For the stained set of shelves, we used the dark walnut stain from Home Depot, and I applied lime wax with a brush overtop to give it that worn/white-washed look. I love that look so much! The cost of the wax seems high, but I can tell you, the can is going to last me SO long. It’s kind of incredible. I then sealed them with a clear matte finish.
Natural Shelves
For the natural set, I loved the slightly thicker look. We originally went with 2×10 boards, but they were flaring SO red. Even lime wax couldn’t fix it. The 2×8 boards were a GORGEOUS bleached wood look, so we decided to use those. We used a sander to sand down rough parts, and that was it! I didn’t even seal them.
Chevron Wooden Wall Art
Joe threw this wall art together pretty quickly while I wasn’t home. For the chevron pattern, he did 45-degree angle cuts in 1×2 pine common board. He glued all the cut pieces to a piece of 1/4″ plywood for the backing. The frame is 1×3 common board turned on its “skinny” side and installed with nails. Once we had all the painted and stained pieces done, he finished the inside edges with 1/4″ round trim pieces, to give it a clean look.
The stain/paint pattern ended up taking the most time because it was hard to come up with a pattern we were happy with. Even after we thought we were done with the painting/staining, we stained a couple more slats.
Another way that you could do this would be painting and staining your pieces before attaching them to the backing – that way you can move them around like a puzzle until you’re happy with it!
The point of this piece is to tie into the shelves, no matter which set is chosen. After we installed the piece in our dining room, we realized we didn’t love the natural wood slats, but a coat of lime wax provided a quick fix!
Industrial Pipe Shelves – 5-Star Project!
And that’s it! We’re excited to swap out the different sets of shelves, and per usual, now we have our eye on a million different projects we want to do below the industrial pipe shelves.
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