How to Shorten an IKEA LACK Shelf

white oak IKEA LACK shelves in kitchen with Hallman range

Do you want to shorten an IKEA LACK Shelf to customize it and fit your space? You’ve come to the right place! I’ll show you how I cut our white stained oak effect IKEA LACK floating shelves to look like custom open shelves for our kitchen. I’ll share pictures below so you can learn how to do the same.

I initially thought I would build custom wood shelves from scratch and stain them to perfectly fit into our kitchen. Let’s just say that staining wood is definitely one of my least favorite parts of DIY! They did not turn out the way I envisioned them. I knew that IKEA had white oak colored LACK shelves so I decided to use them instead and shorten them by cutting part of them off to fit our space.

Note: This post may contain affiliate links, you can find more information in my disclosures here.

Materials

IKEA LACK shelves
Painters tape
Screws

Tools

Step 1: Determine shelf placement and measure needed width

The first step is to determine where the shelves should be placed on the wall. I decided that I wanted two shelves on each side of our DIY range hood. I found it helpful to stick blue painter’s tape on the wall to visualize the spacing between the floating shelf and the countertop and the spacing between two floating shelves:

custom range hood with white brass Hallman 48 inch range

In our kitchen, the distance between the lower floating shelf and the countertop is 18 inches. It’s enough space to place most things on the counter (like a Keurig or KitchenAid). The distance between two floating shelves is 12 inches, which is enough space to place glasses or cooking books on them.

After determining the placement of the shelves, you’ll have to measure the length needed. It’s important to determine the placement first because walls are rarely perfectly straight. That mean that the length needed may be slightly different for each shelf depending on your walls.

Step 2: Cut the shelf to needed length

Once you know the needed length, you can mark where the IKEA LACK shelf needs to be cut. I recommend using painter’s tape to help make the cut line easily visible. The tape also helps get a cleaner cut.

Something to keep in mind before cutting the shelf: it can’t be cut shorter than the bracket that is needed for installation. IKEA sells different lengths though so hopefully you can find a length that will work for your space!

This is what an IKEA LACK shelf looks like on the inside once it’s cut:

Step 3: Install the shelf

Now you can install the cut shelf according to the IKEA instructions. Because the bracket will likely not be perfectly centered anymore (unless you cut an equal amount off both sides of the shelf), I recommend using painter’s tape to mark there the bracket now ends:

When you hold the shelf up to the wall, you can use the tape as a guide to determine where the bracket ends. That will help you determine where you need to drill holes in your wall in relation to that.

Thankfully, the provided IKEA bracket has multiple holes and two rows aligned with our studs, which helps with stability.

Step 4: Caulk edges (optional)

If the gap between your shelf and your wall happens to be larger than expected or you just prefer a cleaner look, you can caulk the edges between your shelf and wall.

Finished shortened IKEA LACK shelves

I’m so excited about how these shelves turned out and they only took a couple hours to cut and install!

IKEA LACK shelf with greige kitchen cabinets

The color of the white oak effect IKEA LACK shelves works really well with our kitchen cabinets (that I painted Sherwin Williams Accessible Beige) and the Hallman range.