They’re finally up! We added floating shelves to the master bathroom, and I am so pleased with the result.

We started this project several weeks ago with Home Decorators Collection floating shelves from Home Depot and quickly ran into a problem. I should have taken pictures, but in summary, the brackets were poorly designed so that it was impossible to screw them in place correctly, either to the wall or the shelf. That was pretty frustrating, since we had already drilled two holes in the wall.

This blank space continued to stare at us while I scoured the Internet for alternatives. We considered keeping the shelves and just buying different brackets, like these decorative ones, but I really wanted the invisible-bracket look. Unfortunately, the reviews I read on other products were not encouraging. It seems that many of them also have poorly-designed brackets and cannot hold a significant amount of weight. While we weren’t planning to pile on books, we certainly wanted something sturdy, so we decided to build our own similar to these.

Then, while we were at Ikea shopping for some other things, we came across the Ekby Jarpen/Bjarnum shelves and brackets. I had originally ruled these out because of the brushed nickel brackets, but after the trouble we’d encountered, they suddenly looked a lot more appealing. Some quick calculations revealed that they would cost us about the same price as building our own shelves, while of course saving us a ton of time, so we went for it.

I am not at all disappointed. While the brackets are not invisible, they are streamlined and the brushed nickel matches our other hardware well.  They were also super easy to install and can hold a lot of weight. That made me dance around the bathroom singing, “We have floating shelves! We have floating shelves!” Now comes the fun part — decorating!