When we moved into our house, we had built in bookshelves and cabinets installed to either side of the fireplace. They cabinets in the bottom have always been a great place to store a lot of the toys. They each have a cabinet. I've gone through several different ways of organizing things but in the last few months, I decided they needed a shelf to utilize a little more of the vertical space.
I figured I could probably tackle this project myself and some day around New Year's I went to Lowe's and picked out my shelving and had the nice man cut the pieces to my measurements.
The first problem is that the 1x10 boards that I purchased were not really 10 inches wide. More like 9. But I had the ledger boards for support cut to 10 inches. They were an inch too long and I didn't want them sticking out from under the shelf.
Also the shelves were just a bit too snug when I fit them in the cabinet. I did a bunch of sanding and fitting and refitting until I thought they were good. Then I put some satin finish polyurethane on my shelves.
The ledger boards sat there for quite a while, staring at me, waiting for me to find a solution for them. I was hoping I might see my neighbor out who could just take an inch off with his saw really quickly. No luck.
It took a couple weeks but it finally hit me that the simplest thing to do was to go back to Lowe's and just buy another $2.50 1x2 and have the man cut it 9 inches instead of 10. Oh, except this nice guy informed me that they can't do cuts less than 12 inches. That other guy must have been breaking the rules for me.
Plan B - I bought a miter box and saw. I came home and hacked that 1 inch off those 4 ledger boards in about 10 minutes. Kind of proud of myself but it cost more to buy the miter box & saw than it did to just buy a new piece of wood.
But then it got cold and I didn't feel like adding the polyurethane to my ledger boards. For a couple weeks.
It warmed up and I finally finished the polyurethane part. Time to screw those ledger boards in and set up my shelves.
Except I guess the poly added a little too much width back to my shelves and they were too tight again. Or I never sanded them enough in the first place.
I got the circular saw out. Told the kids to cover their ears. Made some horrible cuts...one was very crooked and the other I wasn't holding the saw level and the blade didn't go through the wood all the way so I finished it with the hacksaw. Jack asked me why it smelled like things were burning. I got a little short with him.
They were ugly, which was kind of a disappointment. But then I put them in the cabinets. They fit and no one can see how ugly they are. Case closed. Or cabinet closed. Or project finished. The end.
Pictures...
This is Casey's cabinet beforehand. Not too bad. I bought a bunch of $1 shoe containers just after Christmas to organize all her little things...dolls clothes, doll accessories, princess shoes, etc.
But she also had this bin full of (mostly naked) dolls that didn't fit in the cabinet.
The after - It fits a lot more stuff in there. It bothers me a little that the shelf is slightly too narrow for the four shoeboxes to fit perfectly across. I can't really make the cabinet wider though. Although maybe dollar store has slightly narrower boxes.
Jack's cabinet wasn't really in need of the extra space. It basically looked like this but without the shelf. But now it looks nicer.
And another Aha! moment. These cute little license plates have been floating around inside the cabinets for years. Why did I just figure out that I should stick them on the cabinet doors now? But I'm glad it hit me and I like it!
Thus ends the long saga of my shelving project. It really only took a couple hours of total time, but I managed to spread it out over a month or so and add some obstacles to make it more exciting. And I'm very happy with the final results.
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