DIY Leaning Bathroom Shelf
Creating functional storage was very important to me while we did our bathroom renovation (See full renovation reveal here). There is so much unused space behind the toilet in a bathroom, so why not utilize it! We wanted to build something that was more of a statement piece vs. doing floating shelves! So I showed Brett my inspiration and he went to work designing it for me! I absolutely loved how our leaning bathroom shelf turned out and wanted to share how you guys could create it as well! The nice thing is you can custom design the length and height to fit your space the best.
Materials + Tools Needed:
Instructions:
Before you begin building your shelf, you’ll want to decide how tall you want to make it. We decided on making it slightly shorter than the mirrors. If you have tall ceilings, you could make it taller or vice versa!
Once you have your height, measure how far the tank of your toilet sticks out from the wall. The last thing we want is for the shelf to prevent you from flushing the toilet easily! Write that measurement down and subtract a half inch to give you the depth of your bottom shelf. Our shelf ended up being 8 1/2” deep. You can make the bottom shelf skinnier if you’d like, this is just what we did!
Next, measure the height of your toilet. Write that measurement down too. You’ll still want easy access to your toilet tank lid so you don’t want the bottom shelf resting on top. We went with 3 3/4” from the top of the lid to the bottom of our bottom shelf. Just as before, you can make your own judgement call on whether you want to go higher or lower.
Finally, the last measurement. Measure the widest point of your toilet and add 3” to that. That’s how wide your shelves will be. Ours ended up being 23 1/2”. If you have a side flush toilet, you’ll want to add more space to reach the handle.
Now the fun part, cutting and assembling!
We’ll start with the sides. The legs are made with a 1x4 ripped down to 1 1/2” wide. You can rip them down with your table saw if you have one, or you can ask your lumber store very nicely to do it for you when you get the wood. When you cut your legs to length, add 6" to it so you can cut them to the right angle later on. This may not make sense now, but trust me on this.
Now that the legs are done, rip down another section of 1X4 to 1” wide for the supports. Cut both of the bottom shelf supports using the measurement for your bottom shelf depth that you would have written down earlier. While you’re at it, cut the top shelf supports. We cut ours to 4 1/4” to make our shelf 4 1/4” deep. If you want your top shelf to be deeper than 4 1/4”, you can cut it longer.
Lay down two of the leg pieces on a flat surface close to how you want them to line up. Grab the bottom shelf support and using your measurement for the height of the bottom shelf, add six inches to it and mark a line on the leg that will be against the wall. Using your speed square, line it up with the mark and put the top (the side the shelf will sit on) at the mark. Fasten it down with glue and a couple of nails. I used an air powered brad nailer but you could use a trusty hammer or even screws if you don’t mind the look of the screw showing.
Next, take the top shelf bracket and do the same thing at the top of the shelf. Measure down about 3” on the leg that will be against the wall. Mark a line and line up the top of the shelf bracket with this line. Hold it square and glue and nail it.
Now it’s time to align the front leg with the ends of the shelf brackets. You can run it a little long at the top so you can cut it square later or you can leave it as is. Glue and nail the shelf brackets to the front leg. If the brackets are not holding square and feel kind of loose, make sure you hold a square against the leg at the wall to keep the brackets level when you nail them to the front leg. This will make sure the shelves are level when it all comes together.
This is where you need to decide if you want 3, 4, 5 or 10 shelves on your leaning shelf. If you want 4 like we have, this is how you calculate the spacing. Measure from the top of the top shelf bracket to the top of the bottom shelf bracket. Let’s call this 30”. If you want 4 shelves, you would divide this by 3. So that gives you 10 inches. So at 10 inches down from the top bracket, you’ll mark a line and put your next shelf bracket in. And then 10 inches up from the bottom bracket, you’ll mark a line and put in the 4th shelf bracket. Note that you’ll need to measure how long they will be and cut them before installing.
After you install all of the shelf brackets. Do it all over again on the other side of the shelf. So repeat all of those steps but make sure you make a mirror image of the first side as these will have to face each other.
If you’ve made it this far, I’m sorry. But I’m so proud of you. And we’re almost there.
After you have both sides of the shelf done, you can finally cut off the long ends and make them square. Find your total height measurement you wrote down in the beginning because let’s be honest, it’s probably lost. Once you find it, use that measurement and measure down from the top of the shelf leg against the wall to your final height. Mark a line. Using a 2ft framing square, hold it on that line and square up with the leg and mark a line on the front angled leg. Cut the legs at both of these marks. This will make the shelf sit flat. If you need to trim any off the top, you can do that now using the same steps.
Now you can rip down your shelves to the right depth using a table saw and install them. We installed them using nails and glue, again.
We decided to leave ours natural and just put a water based polycrylic over the wood to protect it.
As for installing, we ended up notching out the bottom legs to the profile of our baseboard so that it would sit tight against the wall. We used a Kreg Jig and put one screw into a stud on the bottom side of the 2nd shelf from the bottom. We used a few finishing head screws to fasten the bottom of the legs to the wall. The front legs ended up a little wobbly so I used a dot of gorilla glue and glued them to the floor. It’s held up for 2 months now, even with our aggressive vacuuming.
So that’s it. This was fun. Thanks for having me. - Brett
