Shelves Ahoy!

At long last the shelves are up and painted! I'm not quite sure why that compelled me to say "ahoy", but piratey greetings aside, they're done!!!!

I left you with this tantalisingly (well it is for me) close-to-completion shot the other day...

The shelves themselves need to span a distance of just under 1.6 metres. With supports on the end and only one support in the centre therefore, the material that we used for the shelves needed to be strong enough not to bow in the 80 centimetre (approx) space between supports. We decided to take a trip to the closest demolition yard (which we've got to know intimately over the last year), and went in search of something that would do the job.

We ended up selecting some pieces of decking that were almost exactly the right length to span the entire width, were made of hardwood, were already painted on one side (with the paint in pretty good condition, which made it an easy surface to paint over), and beautifully strong. They still had their original nails in them, so the guy gave us a discount on the price and charged us $4 each. We bought 24 of them (plus he threw in one extra just in case), and got the price rounded down to $90, which came out to $3.75 a board.

You actually got a sneak peek of them back when we were making the brackets for the shelves (see here). They're the blue boards lined up ready for painting in the background of this photo.

So! We gave them a coat of undercoat, and once the posts and brackets were up on the wall (see that process here), we piled them up on the brackets and started the process of screwing each one into each bracket, four deep on each shelf.

That was the fastest part of the process yet!

Then came the prettying stage. I puttied up all of the screw holes. We'd made the effort to countersink the heads of each screw as much as possible, so that they were buried a bit below the surface of each board, meaning that a bit of putty covers over the hole and it's nice and flat again. For most of them.

Then I undercoated the till-then naked posts...

I then dug out the can of grey paint from the cupboard and started on the first coat of colour.

We had used Taubmans' Inverness as the colour for the rest of the walls when we painted them (see here), and I decided that I wanted the shelves in the wall colour rather than stark white, so they blended in a bit more.

The problem was, the grey paint I had grabbed and then proceeded to spend an hour painting over the entire shelves wasn't the same as the wall colour!!! I had hoped that it was just the way it looked when wet that was deceiving, and that it would dry the right colour, but as I stood back and admired my handiwork in dismay, it was definitely wrong. You can see the colour difference in the picture above, and perhaps more clearly below, with the splotch on the wall.

Then I had the good sense to actually look at the paint can (I highly recommend it, preferably before you paint with it), and almost hidden under the paint drips down the side was the word "undercoat". NOOOOOOOOOOO! I'd accidentally picked up a tin of grey tinted undercoat rather than the right grey paint, and then spent an hour up the ladder painting it on.

Sugar.

I heaved a big sigh and managed to unearth the correct paint tin for the next coat, thinking I'd just added yet another coat to what I had to do to get the shelves finished. The image of unstirred paint is always so attractive! But in this case it was a welcome sign, because it proved that the paint had a hint of brown in it, which was decidedly what was lacking in the undercoat colour!

I stirred, and then got painting again.

And painted and painted and painted.

Oh and that's not a baby bump, I find it hard to suck my leftover-from-eating-my-way-through-Europe-last-year tummy in when half-way up a ladder and trying to paint the underside of a shelf level with my head, ok?

To my extreme relief, it turned out that a coat of the proper paint colour over the grey undercoat gave perfect coverage, so there wasn't any need to do yet another coat of the Inverness. Whew! And as it turns out, since we're running a little bit short on Inverness leftover paint to do the new wall we're building to close in the office, using the grey undercoat instead of a second coat of proper colour was a blessing in disguise! It should stretch out that leftover paint just enough! Hooray for happy accidents!

Anyway, back to the shelves! We're a little disappointed about the looks of the little pieces of timber we used to support the very back shelf, since they ruin the nice clean lines, but they won't be noticeable once we fill the shelves up with exciting things like binders. Overall we're pretty darn proud of ourselves! Not bad for made-from-scratch shelves, huh?!

And budget-wise, they were pretty darn cheap, considering how strong they are! Here's the breakdown:

Home-made brackets - $34 (not including the price of the reticulating saw to make them)
3 x 3.2m timber posts - $50 approx (we got them from a demolition yard - can't remember exactly)
VJ board - $6 (we already had it, but had bought it for a project just like this, so it counts)
Shelf boards - $90 (plus we've still got a few leftover because we decided to have five shelves instead of the initial six we were planning on.
Screws - $0 - already had them.
Putty - $0 - already had it
Undercoat (both white and grey) - $0 - already had it
Taubmans Inverness paint - $0 - already had it

Total - $180

So for the grand total of $180 plus quite a fair chunk of hard work and time, this wall has gone through this transformation...

Before                                                              After

This room's now definitely well on its way to becoming my office! Next up? A fourth wall!