Restoration Hardware Look on a Budget

We’ve all done it … looked through a catalog or website of places like Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, Arhaus and drooled over the pictures. But we know it would require months or years of saving or winning the lottery to be able to afford a house full of furniture from them. So, one of my favorite things to do for our house is to find a more budget friendly option that looks similar or do a DIY project. A few years ago, I was wanting an industrial style shelf for our dining room, and all of the ones I was seeing that would have been the right size were well over $1000. I searched Pinterest for a DIY idea and found an IKEA hack that I thought Parker and I could do.

We bought two IKEA Vittsjo shelves HERE in black … one two-section piece and one one-section piece. (If you are wanting each section to be evenly spaced, get the one-section pieces. But we saved a little money doing it this way.) They come with glass shelves which look great too, as you can see when it’s put together ..

Since I was wanting a more rustic industrial look, we replaced the glass with wood. We bought 1×8 boards (which are actually about 7.25in width) at Home Depot and had them cut to length. Doing it this way, it will require two boards per shelf to equal the width, so we needed eight boards total. Parker then measured where the boards would need to be notched out to fit around the bars and cut them out using a jigsaw.

I made a mixture of two stain colors to get this warm gray color. It was about 80% Minwax stain in Classic Gray HERE and about 20% Jacobean HERE. We did the whole project for probably around $250!

We’ve now used this shelf for four years, and it is probably one of the most asked about things in our house when people come over. It’s been in our dining room in our last three houses, but at our current house it wouldn’t fit so we have it in our entryway/living room. I’m brainstorming some ideas of how to use it for storage. Check it out in our three recent dining rooms!