Completed Picture Shelves

 

You may remember that I showed you how I made some really quick and inexpensive picture shelves for my family room.  Here’s what they looked like before:

The frames were too orange-y for me, though, and I knew I wanted to paint them white.  Several weeks passed as I got busy doing other things, but those frames were driving me nuts every time I walked past them.

Finally, I buckled down and got to painting.  It takes a long time to paint so many frames!

And here’s the finished result:

Ahh, that’s much better…

 

I’m linking this up to:

Quick and Inexpensive Picture Shelves

Waaay back in February or March, when I finally got my act together and painted the woodwork in our family room, I also arranged a picture wall behind our couch.  I never really liked it (though I could never pinpoint why) and so I never actually finished putting pictures in the frames.

If you look closely in this picture, you’ll see that many of the pictures have the same photograph of a lovely young couple (who looks nothing like us) AND that the two big frames in the middle still have plastic around the corners.

(I think it actually looks better in this picture than it did in real life.)

For the past several months, every time we’ve had people over, someone has gotten a laugh out of the fact that we are prominently displaying pictures of people we don’t even know.  Har har har.

Last Friday, that all changed!  Ever since school started, I’ve been looking forward to having my Friday’s off, with no kids, to prepare for the weekend and to get some projects done.  Unfortunately, ever since school started, I’ve been out of town or sick or both on Friday.  Last Friday was the first day that I was home, alone, and healthy and I made the most of it!

I have been eyeing the white shelving in the dining room at Young House Love for a while now, but I haven’t wanted to spend any money, so imagine my excitement when Ana at Knock-Off Wood posted instructions on how to build a $10 shelf that was very similar.

Friday morning, I hatched my plan and, after dropping Thing 1 and Thing 2 off at school, I hit Lowe’s.  I had measured earlier and decided that my shelves needed to be 7” long, so I was going to need to cut down my wood.  I decided to have Lowe’s do it, since it would be so much faster than me having to measure and cut each piece (plus, I try to avoid using tools that can remove digits when I’m home alone).

I got home, pulled everything into my workshop (read: family room) and got started.  Believe me when I say these things went together amazingly fast!  I actually built all three shelves in just over 45 minutes IKnowRight?!.  (Well, I built them in 45 minutes the first time…I actually had to take the last shelf apart and do it again, since I had put it together wrong.  There may have been swearing, but I can’t say for sure.  I might suggest adding a few minutes to actually double-check your work before you start drilling and gluing, but YMMV.)

I was by myself, so I couldn’t take pictures of the actual process, but here’s all I did:

1) Have the nice people at Lowe’s cut your 1x4s and 1x2s down to size.

2) Screw one 1x4 to another 1x4

3) Glue the 1x2 onto the front and secure it with finishing nails

I would recommend using clamps to hold your pieces together as you’re securing them.  ESPECIALLY if you’re doing this alone.  (Though I might recommend slightly smaller clamps that don’t fall over because they’re top heavy…)

If you need more hands, heavy battery-powered drills make nice weights.

Here they are after 45 minutes:

And getting painted:

Thing 1 helped me hang them when she got home from school.  (That’s definitely a two person project!)

And then I ran around the house, grabbing every picture frame I could find.  The girls actually had a bunch of fun with that because I was pulling out frames that had been in storage for a while, so we were seeing pictures we hadn’t seen in ages.

I through the pictures up in any old place because I was in a hurry as it was almost time for hubby to get home.  I like to do projects while he’s at work and then hide all the evidence and see how long it takes him to notice.  It’s how I keep our marriage exciting.  I know he appreciates it and feels no pressure.

So, here’s what it looked like when he got home:

He noticed it right away.  (Lucky!)  Of course, it is pretty obvious and, while I had hidden all the evidence, it IS a bit difficult to hide the smell of paint, so he had a hint that he should be on the lookout.

I’m thinking I really like it.  The picture frames are all a little orange-y, so I’ll be painting them white.  I’ll probably need to thin them out a bit too, so it’s not quite so heavy.  The new shelves next to the built-in shelves makes that side of the room much heavier than the window side, so I’ll need to figure out how to add some weight to the other side, but all in all, I’m quite pleased with my quick Friday project!

 

Girls' Project - The Making of a Daybed

My sister and her baby are coming for a visit next month and it's been weighing on my mind that we don't actually have anywhere for her to sleep.  I've been considering all the options (from our inflatable bed to displacing Thing 1 and Thing 2 for a week) and I haven't liked any of them.

One thing I have been liking, however, is this PB knock-off daybed from Knock-off Wood.  That little beauty has been hopping around in my brain for several weeks now.  I've been trying to figure out the best place to put something like that, but there were really only a few options:

• The office - that idea was nixed immediately. Our office is crammed full of stuff and we didn't want to lose the use of our computers whenever anyone visited (even if that is a rare occurrence)
• The living room - there is technically room there to put in a sleeper sofa, but there are huge windows out to our front porch. There would be no privacy at all.  
• The play room - Dingdingdingding! The room is also cramped, but it has a door and a closet and it's right next to a bathroom.

Here's the room in question.  It's a bit messy now (as it usually is) and we'd have to do some serious purging to make sure this room is still pleasant after the addition of a bed.  I'm thinking the bed would go under the window:

Once that decision was made in my head, I continued to ruminate for another week or two.  Yesterday I decided it was high time to stop thinking about it and start doing it!  I grabbed Thing 2 and told her my idea and showed her the pictures.  She was mildly interested, but when I told her I wanted it to be a project that we did together, she lit up! 

We got to work figuring out our supplies list then headed over to our local hardware store to buy some wood!  We ended up getting three sheets of very nice 4' x 8' birch plywood and, while it probably would have fit into our van uncut, we decided to have the nice people there do some of the large cuts for us (so we wouldn't have too!).  That turned out to be a stroke of good luck because the cuts we did at home took forever!  We were definitely following the measure twice, cut once formula (though it was more like measure four times, cut once).  We wanted to make sure our boxes were perfectly square, so we were very careful.

Once the wood was cut, it was time for the girls to get involved.  They already knew how to glue, but I believe this is the first time they'd ever used a drill to drill holes or screw something together.

By the end of the day, we had one of the boxes put together (the bed is just going to be three boxes, all screwed together) and, I must say, it looks very nice!

It was also very nice to be able to work on a project with the girls.  Sometimes, when I'm working on a big project, they'll complain that I'm always busy, so it was a good thing to be able to include them on this.

Of course, now I have to wait until they get home from school before I can do anymore work on it!