Finding studs and hanging it level
Okay. Shelf is finished, or finished enough, or you've decided you're done touching it up and it's time to get it on the wall. This is the last lesson and honestly it might be the one where people get hurt the most, not because it's dangerous exactly, but because everybody rushes the hanging part after all the careful work that came before it. Don't do that. Slow down one more time.
Find your studs first
Drywall alone will not hold a shelf. It'll hold a picture frame, it'll hold a hook with a candle on it, but a shelf with actual weight on it needs to be screwed into the framing behind the wall, which means you need to find a stud.
A stud finder works fine for this. The cheap ones from the hardware store are usually good enough. Run it along the wall where you want the shelf and it'll beep or light up when it crosses a stud. If you don't have one, the old trick still works: knock on the wall with a knuckle and listen for the sound to change from hollow to solid. It takes some practice to hear it. I still second-guess myself sometimes and I've been doing this a long time.
Studs are almost always sixteen inches apart, center to center, sometimes twenty four in older houses. So once you find one, measure over sixteen inches and you'll probably find the next one. Mark it lightly with a pencil, something you can sand or wipe off later, not a big dark X you'll be looking at for the next five years.
The thing is, you want at least two studs under this shelf if you can get them, especially if it's going to hold anything heavier than a few books. One stud and a good screw will probably hold. Two studs and you stop thinking about it.
Getting the level part right
This is where I feel like people get impatient. They've got the studs marked, they just want to drive the screws and be done, and then the shelf goes up a little crooked and they live with it or they take it back down and now there's an extra hole in the wall.
Use an actual level. Not your eye. I don't care how good you think your eye is, mine isn't that good either and I've hung a lot of shelves. Set the level on top of where the shelf will sit, or hold a straight scrap piece across your stud marks with the level on it, and adjust until the bubble's actually in the middle, not close.
Mark your screw height at each stud location with the level still in place, so both marks are true to each other and not just true to the floor, which might not be level itself in an older house. Utah County has plenty of older places where the floor's had forty years to settle a little. Work off the level, not off the floor.
Driving the screws
Use a screw long enough to go through your shelf mounting hardware or ledger board, through the drywall, and a good inch and a half into the stud. This isn't a place to use whatever screw's rattling around in the junk drawer. If you're not sure of the length, buy a small box of proper wood screws made for this, they're cheap.
Pre-drill your holes if you're going into hardwood cleats, same as we talked about a few lessons back, so you're not fighting the wood or stripping the screw. Softwood you can usually get away with driving straight in, but go slow and steady so you don't blow through the stud at an angle and miss it entirely.
I'll say the thing I always say here. Buy a decent level and a stud finder and you're set for basically every shelf, mirror, and curtain rod you'll ever hang in this house. You don't need six specialty tools for this. A few good ones, used carefully, get you through almost everything.
Step back and look at it
Once it's up, step back across the room. Not right next to it, across the room, because that's the distance you'll actually be looking at it from every day. Check that it's level, check that it feels solid when you put a hand on it and press down gently. If it wiggles, you didn't hit the stud, or the screw's not deep enough, and it's worth pulling it back off now rather than finding out later with a stack of books on it.
I built a bookcase a while back for my friend Alexandria's kids, and I let the youngest one hammer in the last nail before we hung it. He was maybe six. The nail went in crooked, bent right over near the top, and I started to pull it to redo it and Alexandria stopped me. They left it crooked on purpose. That bookcase has been on their wall for years now and every time I see it I look right at that one bent nail before anything else. It's not the part I'd point to if I were showing off the work. It's the part I actually like the most.
Your shelf doesn't have to be perfect to be worth keeping on the wall. It has to be level, and it has to be in the stud, and after that, the small stuff you notice is usually the stuff that makes it yours.
Before next time: stand in front of your shelf tomorrow morning with coffee in hand and just look at it for a minute before you load anything onto it. You earned that part.