Shelf Hunged

I wanted to build a shelf for books in our place. After looking at a variety of book shelves and various other storage structures, I decided the coolest and most visually interesting thing to do was hang a hunk of wood. But finding a hunk of wood is harder than you may think. See I wanted something that still had bark on it, or the exterior of a tree. I asked a contractor I knew of any places in the area, he gave me the name of a lumber place in Wisconsin. Here's what I got.

And here's the wall where it's going to live.

After I got the wood home it was time to clear coat and seal it. This was the tedious part, four days of sanding, clear coating and repeating. Fortunately the lumber place was able to get a lot of the work done, they hand a huge machine that sanded it down to 80 grid. From there I went to 120, 220, 320 grid. Applying a coat of clear coat after sanding.

Sanding and clear coating complete it was time to hang. I had help. At first we thought it would be ok to mount it with screws, but that plan was quickly scraped. The wood weighs nearly 80lbs. So we affixed brackets to the wall and two the wood. Here's how it looks.