Finding studs and hanging it level
The shelf is finished — or finished enough, or you've simply decided you're done fussing with it and it's time to get it on the wall. This is the last lesson, and it may well be the one where people get hurt the most. Not because it's dangerous exactly, but because everybody rushes the hanging after all the careful work that came before. Don't. Slow down one more time.
Find your studs first
Drywall on its own will not hold a shelf. It'll hold a picture frame, it'll hold a hook with a candle on it, but a shelf carrying real weight needs to be screwed into the framing behind the wall — which means you need to find a stud.
A stud finder handles this just fine. 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 shift from hollow to solid. It takes some practice to hear it. I still second-guess myself now and then, and I've been at 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 likely find the next. Mark it lightly with a pencil, something you can sand or wipe away later, not a big dark X you'll be staring at for the next five years.
What you're really after is 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 watch 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 touch crooked and either 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 across your stud marks with the level on it, and adjust until the bubble's truly in the middle, not close.
Mark your screw height at each stud 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 pass through your shelf mounting hardware or ledger board, through the drywall, and a good inch and a half into the stud. This is no place for whatever screw's rattling around in the junk drawer. If you're unsure 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 covered a few lessons back — so you're not fighting the wood or stripping the screw. Softwood you can usually drive straight into, 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 just about 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, carry 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 see it from every day. Check that it's level, and check that it feels solid when you lay a hand on it and press down gently. If it wiggles, you didn't hit the stud, or the screw isn't 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 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 my eyes go straight to 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 love 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 very 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.