Since the kitchen is slo-oo-owly coming together, it’s about time to start trickling out some more of the finished projects. One of my favorites is the open shelving that we finished a few weeks back. It was a comparatively easy project, and the impact it has on the room is great.
First – the why. Since we want to keep the room as original as possible, we are limiting our cabinetry options as much as we can to cabinetry that would have existed at the time. We found a great set of salvage cabinets (more on that later!), but the set isn’t comprehensive enough for the whole room. A popular storage option at the time was open shelves, and I really got the urge to try it in our kitchen.
After searching through our options, we found a very nice shelving bracket at Lowe’s for only about $6 a pop. Compared to almost all of the other brackets out there, this was very cheap, and was exactly the ‘look’ we needed.
After this, it was a fairly simple matter of painting/staining the brackets to match the rest of the kitchen, and picking up and staining/polying the wood for the shelves.
To mount, we used heavy duty toggles to anchor the brackets into the walls, and added a few small nails in hard-to-see spots to shore up the mounting.

Holes for the toggles drilled, and brackets beginning to go up. Be sure to measure twice, drill once. Toggle holes are large and hard to change once drilled.
After that, it was simply drilling the shelving boards into the brackets, and that was it! After a few weeks of planning, the actual execution of this project was the matter of only a weekend. This is a weekend project of only about medium difficulty, and the results are worth the effort.
For us, this is a fabulous way to show off some of our favorite antiques (that match the room, of course) and nicer dishes. Also, I’m looking forward to using this fixture in the future to easily switch up the look of the kitchen without any hard work or holes in walls!