Feeling a little Shelfish

With the impending arrival of the addition to our family, we found it necessary to wind up our hobby room to create space for a nursery. As one of us (me) has an extraordinary amount of hobby material, this meant that we need to find some storage somewhere, something that could safely hold all the various materials and models. (mostly unbuilt models of course!)

Since I have an inordinate love of storing things in office boxes, we decided that a set of shelves designed to hold 15+ of these boxes would be ideal. Also, since we do few things by halves here at This Old Blog (should we finish a project at all of course), the shelves were built to be adjustable, hold far more weight than they would, and tied into the rafters and studs for extra support. We also planned to create a seat for changing shoes, and a space to store two large plastic tubs.

As always major construction was accomplished with the aid of my father, and minor work completed by me in the wee hours.

The shelves were built in a corner of the garage by the side door and the door to the house. This space was occupied at the time by a bizarre accumulation of closets built on closets, storing nothing but spiders a the time. Previously it appeared to be a broom, paint, and dust storage closet. This was ripped out, which was difficult, because like everything built by the previous owner in this house, it had about two nails per linear foot of board, sometimes more. All nails were three inches long or more, although the size varied from nail to nail. We ended up ripping the boards out, and removing the nails later when possible.

While we were doing all this, we also replaced the cardboard cladding of the garage corner in question, and drywalled, textured, and painted. Yes, I said cardboard. Some previous owner covered up the studs in the garage with fruit box cardboard. Some of that was subsequently covered with shelving material or drywall. A horrible mess. Removing all of that also exposed some minimal termite damage, which was photographed and scraped away.

After the drywall was installed, the surface textured, the supports tied into the frame of the garage, and the seat constructed, the shelf brackets were installed. Then shelves were cut to fit, supports added to the front edge of each to prevent bowing, the whole mess sanded and painted to match the garage walls.

Now, on with the pictures:

The previous closets on closets

What lies beneath


Drywall up

Putting shelves together

Pre painting and sanding with boxes to test placement

Final paint

Next time on this old blog: Fencing? Wiring? Nursery? Garden or trees? You will have to tune in to find out.

Before & After

I realized that I never did a follow up from this post. A few months ago I finally bought a mantel from craigslist. I had been looking for close to 6 months and finally found one that would have a pretty good fit, be easy to mount and not too expensive. Those were the three main things that were holding me up. Our box and surround are a weird size so hardly any of the mantels I found would work. The mantels that would work were mainly all super heavy concrete which we had no clue how to move let alone mount. Anyway my dad and I drove my round prego self to the middle of nowhere to pick it up. We tried haggling on the price a little but the guy wouldn't budge, I got it for $200, which is not a bad deal considering it is carved wood.

Before:


After:


Now the issue is that the surround is not as big as the mantel so you can see some brick. For now I may just paint the brick that it is still exposed black, but we want something more attractive. What I would like to do is have a hammered copper surround but I am not sure where to start on that search. There is also tile or just getting a bigger piece like the one that's there. Any advice from the peanut gallery?

Backyard - early September 2010

Art Wall

So I have a brand new mindset lately. Or should I say motto? Motto, yes let's go with that. My new motto is "just do it". Not necessarily in the Nike way, (what exactly did they mean by that?) My way of thinking about it is with things around the house. Instead of always walking past that patch of dirty floor thinking "oh, I really should get around to sweeping that" then the next day walking past thinking "still need to sweep" and then the next day "this floor is disgusting, this place is a pigsty" then "you are so lazy, just sweep the floor!" So instead of torturing myself like that I decided to "just do it" - if I see something that I want to fix, just do it right away. It might make me alittle more scatter brained because I am always doing 20 things at once, but at least I'm not beating myself up, and hey, things are actually getting done.

Take our art wall for example. I finally got around to framing a few more pieces of art and finally hanging some on the walls. Its like Mr House said "Gee, after over a year it finally looks like we live here." Here is the finished (for now) art wall.

Decorating project

I have been anxious to finally get some art hung up on these bare walls. It is kind of sad how little decorating we have done considering the fact that we have lived here for over a year. Ok, yes our attention was focused on other, more important things. But a house without decor is like a cake without icing! And who wants to eat a dry icing-less cake? Not me!

So we have had in mind to do an art wall on one side of our living room for some time. Finally I wanted to get started. I really wanted to hang up my poster from Hitchcock's Vertigo on the wall because A. I love it and B. I thought the orange would pop so well against the icy blue of our walls. The problem was that I decided the poster was just too big to be included on the art wall. Also maybe I had this nagging thought of "Hey now Abby, you are a real adult. REAL adults don't hang movie posters on the walls unless it is in their home theater. Do you have a home theater? No??"

But I digress. I decided to chop my beloved poster down to a smaller size and frame just a chunk of it. This way I could make it more artsy and less postery and it would be a more digestible size for my wall. Here is what the original poster looked like - don't worry, it wasn't original or anything close to good quality. It had rips and tape pieces from when we had it hung over our very steep staircase in our old apartment and I had to jump up and rip it off the wall when we moved.

I found this interesting frame at Aaron Bros (one penny sale score!) and just moved the matte around until I liked it. I decided that I liked the font too much to cut the text out completely, but I didn't really want it to include whole words. Also I wasn't crazy about the idea of my wall saying "Hitchcock's piece".

Finally I stuck it in the frame, and voila! New art!



Now to finish framing some other things and hopefully our cake will soon be iced!