Shelves for Fireplace Niches

There were these niches on either side of my fireplace that were pretty much going unused. I suppose they're really for fireplace tools, but I rarely have fires, and when I do, they're usually Duraflame, which don't really require a poker. ;-) I wanted to put shelves up in the niches. At the same time, I got rid of my heavy tub chairs, which took up too much visual space for the small area, and replace them with lighter wooden lounge chairs. February, 2013.

Trying to figure out the spacing for the shelves with cardboard mock-ups. The tub chairs have been shunted off to the side. I also got rid of the tables -- just too crowded in the small space. 

I liked the idea of staggering the shelves and making them shorter than the whole width, so they'd appear to be floating.

Is three too many? How about two? No, in the end, three looked better.

Shelves in place! They're cut from vertical grain dogulas fir plywood, which is the same as the cabinets in my kitchen and upstairs bathroom. I chamfered the underside edges with a router, also similar to the cabinet doors.

trying some books... A nice advantage to the incomplete shelves is that they can accommodate taller books.

Even my really really tall National Geographic atlas.

The unabridged dictionary looks great there, as does a picture frame I bought on sale a long time ago and had been just sitting in a closet. Sadly, the dictionary doesn't get used much now that I have an iPhone.

Finished product, all stained and polyacrylic'd.

The mounting hardware. I chiseled out the space behind the keyholes by hand, since I was using mostly drywall anchors that had rounded-head screws. Plus, the wall angles turned out to be wider than 90 degrees, so a bit of slop was necessary to make sure all the screws could meet their keyhole.

A view of the screws that hold up the shelves. Either the screws are in a stud, or there's a 70-lb drywall anchor behind them.

The finished room!