Floating shelves for the living room are the perfect spot to showcase your family photos, knickknacks, plants, and any other personal trinkets you’d want all your house guests to see. Adding some floating shelves might be the perfect answer for you if you want to tweak or update your living room décor and add some spice to it.
Your living space can instantly look and feel uninviting and cold if you only have bare walls. Sadly, you can’t just fill them up with photographs and artwork alone. Floating shelves can enhance the walls, create a space for storage and display, and breathe new life into your living quarters.
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What are Floating Shelves for the Living Room?
A floating shelf is a type of shelving fixed to the wall without visible support hardware. Aside from being a stylish and innovative means of adding extra space for storage to any room, floating shelves also provide an attractive way to showcase decorative items with no need to use up too much valuable wall space.
These special types of shelves are typically made of wood, glass, metal, or plastic. They are also available in various shapes and sizes that can easily complement most interior designs.
The wall-mounted shelf is the most common type, with concealed brackets attaching it to the wall. The brackets make them easy to maintain and install since they don’t need the complicated mountain hardware that conventional shelving units do. These types of shelves for the living room are also available in movable freestanding designs.
Specifications of Living Room Floating Shelves
The objects that you plan to place on them decide the depth of your floating shelves. If you want to use the shelving unit mainly for book collections or albums, you might be better off with deeper shelves because they offer better stability and support for heavier objects.
But if you just want to showcase some light items like pictures or candles, you’re better off with shallow shelves since these won’t occupy most of the wall space in your living room.
Make sure you place your floating shelves for the living room above the wall studs for support. Wall studs are usually 16 inches apart, which means that the distance between the shelves must also be at least 16 inches.
A stud finder can help you identify the distance between the wall studs. There are instances when these are several inches farther compared to the standards.
The specific number of wall studs that the floating shelves are attached to will determine the amount of weight you can place on them. Every wall stud allows a floating shelf to support around 50 pounds. If two wall studs were used for attaching your shelf, it can easily support a maximum of 100 pounds whatever its depth is.
What Items Look Great on Floating Shelves?
For your floating shelves for the living room, you can fill them with books, plants, pictures, candles, knickknacks, and electronics. You can put just about anything on them as long as you consider the specifications stated above.