Floating Shelf Installation Hacks - Keys for a TIGHT Install

what's up guys welcome back to the channel i've got 20 floating shelves to install in this house so i'm going to show you some of my little tricks and secrets that i use to install these things how to get a really nice crispy install as well as some tricks for supporting floating shelves when you don't have sidewalls to help hold them up or whenever they're just really big and long so there's going to be a lot of value in this video if you ever have to install floating shelves so let's just dig right into it first installation we're going to do is going to be three floating shelves on both sides of this fireplace bump out we've got sidewall on both sides but the span of the shelf is about 80 inches which is pretty wide if the customer is going to put anything heavy in the center of it so i'm going to give these shelves some additional support by adding threaded rod in the center drilling all the way into the studs this is a great trick to support floating shelves especially if you have to add your floating shelves after drywall and you can't install any brackets prior to drywall the first thing we want to do is do our layout for our spacing and i've ran level pencil lines all the way around the bump out so i know right where to put my cleat now these shelves are hollow on the inside i've got a little bit more than a three-quarter inch cavity so all i did was rip some three-quarter by three-quarter inch strips use pl premium and attach those all the way around the cavity which you can see here and then we'll also do that above for the next two shelves step one is going to be to drill my 7 8 inch hole for my threaded rod now this is three quarter inch threaded rod you can get this at lowe's home depot wherever you might think well why wouldn't you just go three quarters of an inch number one your hole would have to be perfectly straight and if it's not it's going to throw your shelf off number two we've got this awesome thing called pl premium which we can fill the cavity with and is actually going to expand as it cures and fill any voids so 7 8 of an inch is going to be the ideal size for our hole you want to make sure that you start your hole in the center of the stud so i was very careful and laid out where my studs were prior to even installing these base cabinets so i know i'm going to be hopefully hitting the center of the stud and not any water lines or electrical things or stuff like that now the next thing we need to do is get our measurement in order to cut the floating shelf and what we're really going to do is actually make more of a template and to do that we're going to use my stair tread gauges these are something you can purchase off amazon i will put a link in the notes below for these they're super handy whenever you need to cut something precisely in between walls such as floating shelves or stair treads so i've got this one by two cut to length i always mark the sides i put an r for right that way i don't get the jig flipped around whenever i have to actually mark the stair tread or the floating shelf or whatever it may be later on the advantage to having these cleats on the wall first is that it gives me something to set my stair tread gauges down on top of makes it really easy to adjust these nice and tight to the opening to get a really precise measurement so i just loosen down both sides and ensure that it is pressed firmly against the wall then we'll tighten them down again go back and check the other side and now i can simply pull it off and i have an exact template on the angles that i need to cut this floating shelf here's a pro tip whenever you're doing these stain grade shelves you may end up with a gap if you're human and you're not perfect now if you don't have tape on the floating shelf and you try to caulk it your caulk is going to smear onto the stain grade material and you're going to have problems but by putting tape on the shelf prior to cutting it that tape is going to be perfectly even with the edge of the floating shelf and then if i do by chance end up with a gap it's really easy for me to simply caulk that then i can pull the tape off and we won't have any problems and it's really easy now we'll simply take our stair tread gauge line it up with the back edge of the shelf and try and center it approximately take your utility knife and score the plywood along the metal using good miter saw technique is going to be really important in order not to get really bad tear out this blade is spinning like this and if you just tear right through this it's going to pull the grain of the plywood up so what i want to do is make a very shallow pass first across the top face and that's going to prevent that blade from pulling really hard on this grain up by just going shallow then i'll go the rest of the way through this top layer and then whenever we go through the bottom the blade will be spinning and pulling up so it shouldn't be an issue with tear out on the bottom [Music] so you can see making that cut we didn't pull any of the plywood up on top we've got a nice clean cut there as well as on the bottom by using good technique with the miter saw [Applause] you may have noticed whenever i was cutting these on the miter saw i had actually a perfectly square cut at zero degrees here one thing i did was i slightly tilted that cut in ever so slightly so that the back of the shelf would be narrower than the front that's going to make it way easier to slide into place if you're trying to slide this into place with two square cuts at the exact width it's going to be very difficult the most important thing to me is i want my front edge to be as close to the exact width as possible so you get that visual of a nice tight cut but if i have a little bit of gap on the back side here with this tape after the shelf was installed all i've got to do is caulk that a little bit pull it nice and tight pull the tape off and it looks like it grew together so a little trade tip that'll really help a lot this is the cleat that i nailed onto the back wall you'll notice that i rounded over the front edges on the cleat and i just rounded over the inside edges on the back of the floating shelf what that is going to do is it is going to help everything to slide into place much better if you just have two perfectly square crisp edges on these two different materials and you're trying to slide that in place any slight variation is going to make it so that that shelf is not going to climb up onto that cleat and you're going to have a really bad day so just taking a couple extra seconds to put a round over on these edges is going to make everything slide in place really nice during the install another key thing that will really help you from making a mess whenever you put your adhesive on is to apply the adhesive to the inside of the shelf rather than to the top of the bracket like i did the last time it'll make much less of a mess whenever you slide it in place i'm going to go ahead and fill my hole up with adhesive and i want just enough that i can start to see that i'm going to get a little bit of squeeze out without making too much of a mess that's not quite enough if you're afraid to get some pl on your fingers are you even a real man probably not oh my goodness lastly before i slide the shelf into place i want to make a nice generous amount of pl in this area where that threaded rod is and then as that pl cures it'll expand around that rod and make it really solid [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] ah forgot the rod [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Insider Carpentry - Spencer Lewis

Views: 78,358

Rating: 4.9526792 out of 5

Keywords: insider carpentry, finish carpentry, festool, diy, dewalt

Id: Irup0nfmmyE

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021