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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna do is gonna 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 gonna put anything heavy in the center of it. So I'm gonna 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 3 1⁄4 inch cavity, so all I did was rip some 3 1⁄4 by 3 1⁄4 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 gonna be to drill my 7 1⁄8 inch hole for my threaded rod. Now this is 3 1⁄4 inch threaded rod. You can get this at Lowe's, Home Depot, wherever. You might think, well, why wouldn't you just go 3 1⁄4 of an inch? Number one, your hole would have to be perfectly straight and if it's not, it's gonna 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 1⁄8 of an inch is gonna be the ideal size for our hole. You wanna 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 gonna 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 gonna do is actually make more of a template and to do that, we're gonna 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 gonna smear onto the stain grade material and you're gonna have problems. But by putting tape on the shelf prior to cutting it, that tape is gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna pull the grain of the plywood up. So what I wanna do is make a very shallow pass first across the top face and that's gonna 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. So you can see making that cut, we didn't pull any of the plywood up on top, we got a nice clean cut there as well as on the bottom by using good technique with the miter saw. 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 backside here with this tape, after the shelf was installed, all I've gotta 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 gonna do is it is gonna 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 gonna make it so that that shelf is not gonna climb up onto that cleat and you're gonna have a really bad day. So just taking a couple extra seconds to put a round over on these edges is gonna make everything slide in place really nice during the install. Another key thing that'll 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 gonna go ahead and fill my hole up with adhesive and I want just enough that I can start to see that I'm gonna 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. Lastly, before I slide the shelf into place, I wanna 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. Oh.