DIY Restoration Hardware Inspired Rolling Cart

I have been on the hunt for a hutch for our dining room pretty much since the day we moved in. I have something in my mind but so far have not had any luck finding it at a reasonable price. I got all the dark trim in the room and windows and the chair rail painted Simply White and I painted the walls Gray Owl at 75% last fall. Then over the last year I have played around with the room and added things like our chandelier and a sideboard but haven't put a ton of effort into the room because it's probably the room we use the least in our house. Finally though, now that we've made progress in the rest of the house I was excited to get back to this room. It's actually the first room you see when you enter our house so it's been driving me a little bit crazy that when you walked in the front door the first thing you saw was this bare wall in our dining room. I am still going to be on the lookout for a hutch because I think that will ultimately look better with the chandelier and mirror and overall look of the room, and if/when I do ever find one I have a spot for this piece up next to my desk where I can keep my office and art supplies on it.

Until then, I am so excited to finally have the dining room feeling a little more finished. And I love having all the shelves to play around with and change up seasonally. I am not thrilled with how dark I stained it but that's my own fault. I did the staining part in our dimly lit garage at about 3am and when I saw it the next morning I was so mad. I should have waited until the next day so that I could actually see and not have rushed through it! I wanted a lighter look because I am planning on either using a dark wallpaper or painting the walls in the dining room dark soon and now this is going to blend in a little too much. Other than that though I am excited about how it turned out!

I recently built a similar industrial styled shelf for Jason's house but I found the plans to be confusing and it seemed to have quite a few unnecessary steps and the cost of the supplies was a lot more than I had anticipated. It also took me several days and I kept thinking the whole time that it seemed like it should be a much easier project. So, when I decided to make my one for our dining room I decided to come up with my own plan.

Please keep in mind that I really have no idea what I am doing. Over the last two years I just have started playing around with some different building projects and have learned things with just lots of trial and error (LOTS and LOTS of error!) Normally I wouldn't give a tutorial for a building project I would just link to one. But when I was looking for a tutorial for this to follow I didn't have any luck finding one that was this size so I am going to do my best to share as best I can how I built this.

Because I had just finished building our dining room table a few nights before (I will have pictures of that later this week and links to the fabulous tutorial I used from Ana White's website) I wanted this project to be super easy. Fortunately it was! I started building it around 9:30 one night after the girls were in bed and finished it around 12:30 I think and then spent from about 12:30 to 3:30 sanding and staining it. So it was really only about a 3 hour building project which isn't bad! (And I don't really know what I am doing, so someone who does could probably build it more quickly or if you had someone helping you it would go a lot quicker too).

You can find the inspiration piece here at Restoration Hardware. It sells for $2500! The wood for this project cost me a little less than $75 and then I spent another $40 on the casters. And if you throw in the brackets and screws I think it probably came in right around $125.

INDUSTRIAL WOOD ROLLING SHELVES TUTORIAL

I intentionally made mine very narrow because our dining room isn't very wide. Because of that if a child ever tried to climb on it I think it would flip very easy so I actually used a little child's safety thing I had leftover from something we bought at IKEA earlier this year and attached ours to the chair rail that way it way it couldn't flip. If you don't need to have it as narrow as mine I would recommend instead of using one 2 by 12 for each shelf using maybe two 2 by 8's that you can use pocket holes to combine into one deeper shelf. If I ever make another one of these for a space that has more room I think I will probably do that just to help reduce the chance of it tipping over.

So, here's what you need:

(4) 2 by 12's cut to 52" long
(4) 2 by 4's cut to 51" long
(4) 2 by 2's cut to about 4 1/4" long **optional** (I'd cut these at the end and make sure they fit each of the four corners)
(4) dowels cut a little longer than 52" (I think I ended up cutting mine to about 52 1/2") I am not sure on the thickness of the dowels I used except that they were the thickest ones that Lowe's had - I'm guessing they were 1 1/4" or 1 3/8")
(4) casters **optional**
(4) corner brackets **optional**

Tools and other supplies:
Drill
Kreg Jig and pocket hole screws
A Spade Bit - I think that's what it's called (to drill the holes for the dowels - I used one that was 1 3/8")
Spray Paint - For the dowels, corner brackets and wheels

Stain - Rustoleum's Weathered Gray and Minwax's Provincial
Saw **Optional** - I also used my miter saw to cut more precise cuts for the four 2 by 2's although the 2 by 2's are optional so if you don't have your own saw you can just have the lumber yard cut your other wood and you'll be fine!

These next photos were all taken in our garage late at night with my phone so the photos are awful.

The first thing you want to do is spray paint your dowels so that they dry once you are ready to start building. This is the paint I used but really you can use any metallic type paint that you want to give you that look of it being a metal rod in the back of the piece.

And while you have the paint out you can also spray any of the other metals if you want to. I painted the casters as well as the corner brackets. (You don't have to paint either of those though - that's just personal preference and dependent on the look you are going for).

Here are the dowels. I set them up on some extra wood and then painted them and once they were dried rolled them and painted the other side.

Here they are painted.

Next you want to drill all of your pocket holes with your Kreg Jig. You need to do them on each of the two ends of the 2 by 12's. When I first started this project I was kind of making it up as I went along so I did some this way.

And for other ones (like the one below on the right I added a few more pocket holes. In the end I didn't need all of them and really just needed it like shown above for the top and bottom shelves and for the middle two shelves the middle hole wasn't necessary).

Next you want to use one of these to drill holes for the dowels to fit in. They just need to be about a 1/4" deep.

You'll want to drill three holes one one of the 2 by 4's and 3 holes on a second 2 by 4. (The two remaining 2 by 4's do NOT need holes). I played around with my measurements a bit and am not sure what exactly how far down on each 2 by 4 I went but basically you want to just line the four shelves up in place and put a dowel between each shelf. (You can look at the finished project to see what I mean.)

Now that you've got everything ready it's time to put it together! The fun part in my opinion! YAY!
I used a clamp this time (normally I just kind of awkwardly push things up against walls or blocks of wood to help balance but I finally bought a clamp a few weeks ago and that really helps, or of course if you have someone to help you that would be good too) and then started drilling the top shelf to the top of one of the 2 by 4's.

Then I put the top dowel into that left 2 by 4 top hole and then into the right 2 by 4 top hole (and you can put the other ones in if you want to at this point) and then I used the pocket holes to attach the right to by four to the top shelf. Then just move your way down the piece attaching both of the back 2 by 4's to each shelf and making sure the dowels are in place.

Once all four shelves were attached and the dowels secure to the back 2 by 4's I stood the piece up to make sure everything looked nice and level!

Then I laid it back down and attached the front 2 by 4's and once they were attached stood it back up to make sure everything was good. Here's what it should look like at this point.

Then to give it a slightly more finished look I attached the 2 by 2 pieces to the top and bottom corners like this. This particular piece I didn't cut quite right and I had to cut one that fit a little better which I of course forgot to photograph. You can do this at the end of all of the shelves but I like how it looks doing just the top and bottom pieces.

Then I just screwed the casters onto the base and stained the whole piece. I first used a coat of weathered gray and then topped it with a coat of provincial. As I mentioned above it was in the wee hours of the morning and I was rushing through it and I went on way too heavy with the stain and am disappointed in how dark it turned out. I've stained quite a few other pieces (our dining room table, the top of our new kitchen sideboard, several of our chalkboards, etc.) with this mix and normally am paying a bit more attention to what I am doing and have always been happy with the overall tone of it. And then once the stain is dry you can add a wax or some other kind of finish (I haven't done that yet) and then have fun adding your things to it!

Here it is: