Our custom nursery built-in

The very last big project I had planned for the nursery was to make a built-in unit in an empty nook of the room. Our house lacks in storage (tiny farmhouse closets and no attic space) so wherever I can add storage, you can bet I will!! My original design for this nook was to build a lower cabinet and an upper cabinet but after looking at it a little closer, I really loved the idea of building floating shelves in place of the upper cabinet and I’m so happy I decided to go that route!!

This post may contain affiliate links and I may earn a small commission when you click the links at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases. You may read my full disclaimer here.

My long term plan is to make this nook a desk area someday so I didn’t want to do anything too permanent. So instead of building a full lower cabinet, I just built a face frame out of select 1×3 pine. This way I can just remove the face frame and doors someday and it will be the perfect desk area. To make the face frame, I measured my opening and cut the frame pieces to fit my opening. I attached the 4 pieces of the frame with pocket hole screws on the back side.

Next, I measured the opening for my countertop. I cut 1/2 inch plywood to the dimensions of my opening. To support the countertop, I screwed scrap 1×2 supports into the wall, making sure they were level, for the countertop to rest on.

After my countertop was in place, it was time to mount the face frame. I needed something secure to screw the frame to so I cut a few scraps of 1×2 boards and pre-drilled pocket hole screws in from the back to attach the frame from the backside to my support pieces. The last piece to the bottom unit was to build or buy doors for the cabinet. We decided to build them and used 1 1/4″ overlay hinges to attach them to the frame. We added a decorative handle to both doors and the bottom section was complete!

To build the floating shelves, I first measured and taped out the height I wanted between them to make sure it looked alright from a distance. Once I was satisfied with the height between them, I had to decide how deep to make them. The lower cabinet was approximately 18″ deep so I wanted to make the shelves 12″ deep. I had to then measure the width of the opening to build my shelf supports. This is the part you want to be very specific on getting right because once the supports are built, if they are too wider or narrow, you have to disassemble the entire thing to fix it.

The width of my opening was 31″ so to build the supports, I cut down 1×4 studs to the correct size I needed for the frame. I knew I needed the frame of this to be 12″x31″ with a center support. I attached the frame together with 3″ screws, using 2 screws to secure each corner. Then I added a center support since I knew I was going to use 1/4 inch plywood for the top and bottom of the shelf, I didn’t want it to sag in the center.

Once my 3 shelf frames were built, it was time to attach them to the wall. I located the studs on the wall and marked them in pencil. I used 3″ screws to attach the frames to the wall on where I marked the studs.

Once my frames were attached, it was time to make these pretty!! My goal was the match the shelf color as close to the crib color as possible. I cut 1/4″ birch plywood for the tops and bottoms of the shelves and 4″ select pine for the front.

I used a white wash over the shelves and it turned out to be almost a perfect match. For the shelf top, bottom and front, I attached these to the frame with finish nails. I filled in the nail holes with wood filler and caulked all the seams for a finished look! The entire bottom unit got 2 coats of Sherwin Williams pure white cabinet and trim paint

This little nook of the nursery is now one of my favorite projects to date!! It makes those late night feedings a little more enjoyable to be able to snuggle our sweet baby and enjoy his room officially complete!!