Modern Floating Sideboard DIY

written by:Lorene

Our guest today has a beautiful modern space to share with you, focused around this stunning floating sideboard. 

modern dining room with large art and floating sideboard

A sideboard is a perfect piece to help set the style and tone of your room, and can easily be redecorated as your styles or the seasons change. Just look how each of these beautiful sideboards brings so much life to the room!

A Swell Place To Dwell, midcenturymodern sideboard updateA Swell Place to Dwell

The Friendly Home, rustic sideboardA Friendly Home

The House of Wood, bar cabinet sideboardThe House of Wood

And now, I’ll let our wonderful guest Anu tell you how she built and decorated her floating sideboard.

DIY Floating Sideboard

by Anu of Nalle’s House

Hi, I’m Anu from Nalle’s House.  I am a mom to two boys and a golden retriever, “Nalle” (which means “teddy bear” in Finnish).  As you might guess from our dog’s Finnish name, our background is Finnish and our style is very much influenced by Scandinavian design.  I love to make things and DIY around our mid century ranch adding a little Scandinavian modern style to our spaces as I go.  Some of my favourite projects include our mini mudroom, living room art (found here and here) as well as some crafty projects like this brag book.  

I am so happy that Cassity asked me to be here to share my dining room floating sideboard project with you.  
DIY floating sideboard in modern dining room
This sideboard is really a very simple build-it-yourself piece with tons of mod style.  
diy floating sideboard

 This is what we used to make our sideboard: 

  • three 36″ x 24″ ikea cabinets (over the fridge cabinets with Applad doors) with the Ikea mounting rails and hardware
  • a custom plained black cherry wood top (9 feet wide, 12 inches deep and 1 inch thick)
  • wood screws for attaching the cabinets and wood top
  • fine grit sand paper 
  • Waterlox for finishing the wood
Here’s how we made our sideboard:
  1. Have your top plained to the size of your sideboard.  If you’re in the Toronto area, we went to this mill that carried all kinds of wood and had a fun time finding our cherry wood piece.  Our 9 foot piece cost less than $100 plained, but would have been considerably less if we had chosen a different species of wood such as poplar.  When you get a well plained piece of wood it only requires a light sanding before finishing.  We wanted to just seal the lovely wood we had so we used some Waterlox.  diy floating sideboard with milled cherry wood top
  2. Mount your cupboards to the wall:  We mounted three 36″ x 24″ ikea cabinets (over the fridge cabinets with Applad doors) using the Ikea kitchen mounting rails.  Since our sideboard was so long, we needed two rails.  One was cut down to fit with a hacksaw.  Installing Ikea cabinets is super easy.  You basically just need to level the rail and attach your cupboards to it (the cabinets will automatically be nice and level as well). We mounted our cupboards 8 1/2 ” from the floor.  The top of the sideboard is 33 1/2 ” from the floor.
  3. Next attach your cupboards to one another from the inside using the screws provided with the cupboards.  
  4. Then attach your wood top to the cupboards by screwing from the inside of the cupboards to the underside of the wood top.  
  5. Enjoy your beautiful new sideboard!
modern dining room with large art and floating sideboard
 
Let’s peek inside just for fun.  🙂  The sideboard is perfect for storing dishes and dining room things, but I also have a section dedicated to the kids’ arts and crafts.
use a floating sideboard to store mugs
 

Here are some tips to keep in mind when designing your own sideboard for your space:

1.  Choose your cabinets thoughtfully.  I chose the taller over the fridge cabinets because I liked that they were a little shorter than the regular wall cabinets.  This makes the sideboard look more custom since it doesn’t match the height of our kitchen cabinets exactly.
 
2.  Consider the finishes in the adjoining rooms.  Our kitchen and living room are both open to the dining room and it made sense to choose cupboards that matched both spaces.  We have the same plain white doors on our drawer fronts and pantry doors in the kitchen and white flat front credenzas in our living room.  
 
3.  Let your overall room style guide your sideboard’s finishes.  In the photo below, you can see that we didn’t overhang the wood top at all.  It is flush with the cabinet which gives it a really clean look and complements our mid century modern Saarinen Tulip Table and Executive Chairs well.  We also chose to leave the doors unadorned to continue this clean look and to make them toddler proof. :).  However, if you’re room has a little more decoration or a more traditional feel then an easy way to change the whole feel of the piece would be to add some hardware or even switch up the door fronts to something with a more decorative profile (shaker, raised panel, etc.).  
how to decorate a modern floating sideboard
 
4.  Figure out the height at which you want to have your sideboard.  We tried to make our sideboard be a little higher than our dining table, but not as high as our kitchen countertops for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, we wanted the piece to be at a comfortable height for placing serving dishes on (i.e., not too high).  Secondly, we wanted it to be taller than the dining table so that there would be difference between the two horizontal surfaces allowing both furniture pieces to have their own visual prominence in the room.
 
5.  To decorate and style the sideboard, we started with the large scale print.  Our family loves planes and the black and white vintage plane ties together both the modern and vintage elements that we have going on in the room.  The accessories were purposefully kept minimal to allow the art to have enough space in our standard ceiling height room.  The accessories (art glass, Aalto vase, Sarpaneva candle sticks) are also vintage and/or modern and reflect the overall feel of the room.
 
Just in case you were wondering what our dining room looked like before (this photo was taken when we first looked at our house and these were the tenant’s things):
dining room before the modern floating sideboard
 
Here it is now (from two different angles):
dining room after the modern floating sideboard
minimalist scandinavian modern dining room with floating sideboard
Much better!  No?  The DIY floating sideboard really gave the room a custom look that we love.
 
Thanks again for having me here.  I hope you enjoyed this DIY project!
 
Thank you for sharing with us, Anu!
If you love Anu’s style, be sure to head over to Nalle’s House to see more of  her beautiful home!
 
Lorene
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Lorene has been behind the scenes here at Remodelaholic for more than a decade! She believes that planning projects and actually completing them are two different hobbies, but that doesn't stop her from planning at least a dozen projects at any given time. She spends her free time creating memories with her husband and 5 kids, traveling as far as she can afford, and partaking of books in any form available.

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