I made a few of these “plant shelves” at the old house, but we left most of them behind when we moved. A plant shelf is a shelf that goes in front of the window so that the plants get sunlight, and that has a raised edge of some kind so that the potted plants can’t fall off or get pushed off the shelf by cats.
Sweetie asked me if I’d build a plant shelf for the house we live in, you know, now. Most of the dining room furniture we have is made from cherry wood, so I went up to the Alben Sawmill to buy enough cherry to make this plant shelf. Ray Alben gave me a fantastic deal on a couple of stunning cherry boards, and he threw in a couple bonus boards to sweeten the deal.
After taking way too much time to plane the boards down to 3/4″ (Ray suggested new planer knives. Spoiler: He was right!) I cut the shelf part of the shelf down to size. Then, I cut the other board down into the “railing” pieces, mitered the ends for joining, and cut dadoes into them to hold the shelf part of the shelf. Tape, glue, and boiled linseed oil later, and we had a new plant shelf.
The trick is mounting it to the brackets so that the shelf itself stays away from the venetian blinds. Anyway, I’m really happy with how this came out, and with how easy this project seemed while I was doing it. The first three plant shelves that I made, I guess like 15 years ago at least, were a huge pain and had a couple of problems that I never resolved. The fact that this went smoothly means that I’m actually getting somewhere with all this practice.
Anyway, here’s what it looks like full of plants:
