Mexican Shelf

I have a client who wanted a very small shelf to match his existing furniture. He wanted a 20”x5” pine shelf with as little hardware visible as possible, and he wanted it to be antiqued and mexicanized like his hutch and end table. It also needed to be mounted to a brick wall. Building mexican furniture is fun because they purposely beat the crap out of the wood to make it look cool. It’s also easy to finish. Here’s how I built it.

I cut the wood up and assembled up the mitered corners, gluing the pieces and clamping them down, leaving the front piece off. Then I drilled countersunk holes for the anchors. I drilled five of them so I could use more shallow anchors. This also allowed me to level the piece easier. I wanted the hardware to be hidden and then just attach the front piece after it was installed to hide everything. It worked great.

When I had everything together, I stained the piece with a honey oak minwax stain and then took it out to the garden and threw it around in the dirt and rocks. Then I beat it with a chain lightly and rubbed it up againts a rough brick. Then, I took steel wool and brushed the whole piece vigorously. I applied more stain as needed and then steel wooled again. It came out exactly the right color (must have been the dirt :-). I finished it with furniture was. That’s what most of the Mexican furniture places use. It’s cheap and easy. It was a lot of work to rough something up and make it look cheap. Not my thing, but I do what I’m told. It was fun nonetheless.

So I installed it drilling pilot holes in the masonry and using a level. Then I used a brad nailer to secure the front piece on and used colored wood putty to fill in the brad holes. Turned out nice. Hold their clock up great. On to the next project….

-- Thomas Porter, Phoenix, AZ, www.thomasporter.com