First things first... I may have turn into THAT mom. You know the mom that
enters their kids into photo contests!?! If you have a facebook and feel
so inclined, Sophie and Lillian would love for you to give them a 5
star rating. You guys, the prize is an Ipad. An IPAD! I would love you
forever and promise to never stop blogging if you gave us a vote.
I've been wanting new shelves in our living room since we moved into our house. The ones we were using I bought when I was single and sharing an apartment with 5 girls. They were tiny, cheap, walmart shelves that needed to go. I've been eyeing the Expedit shelves from Ikea since my aunt got them years and years ago. I convinced Josh that was what we needed, so we headed to Ikea. We quickly realized however, that $140 for one shelf is a lot of money (for us at least) and Josh wasn't super in love with something made of particle board that you still had to build yourself. He'd been looking for a project to do or a new hobby to pick up, so we thought building our own shelves and being able to customize them to what we wanted would be perfect.
I've been wanting new shelves in our living room since we moved into our house. The ones we were using I bought when I was single and sharing an apartment with 5 girls. They were tiny, cheap, walmart shelves that needed to go. I've been eyeing the Expedit shelves from Ikea since my aunt got them years and years ago. I convinced Josh that was what we needed, so we headed to Ikea. We quickly realized however, that $140 for one shelf is a lot of money (for us at least) and Josh wasn't super in love with something made of particle board that you still had to build yourself. He'd been looking for a project to do or a new hobby to pick up, so we thought building our own shelves and being able to customize them to what we wanted would be perfect.
We bought a few of the bins that we wanted to go in the shelves and based the measurements off that. A couple trips to Home Depot (or was it Lowe's? I don't remember...) and we had the wood, the saw, the sandpaper, putty, screws and the paint. I also learned to never take toddler twins to a hardware store again. Do you know how many things they can grab off the shelves or out of those little cubbies? Sorry to whoever is looking for a specific size screw or bolt because they're ALL mixed up thanks to my girls. And the screams when they got in trouble? The double screeching echos down the warehouse aisles were enough to make me grab both girls in the football hold and bolt out of there without making eye contact with anyone. Anyway, here are some pictures of the process...
He started it the night we got all the supplies.
and continued working on it for the next couple of days
I debated if I was going to show you the shelves in our house, but for now I don't think I will. We decided that we want to get different bins and so a lot of the shelves are empty or only have a book or two in them. We're planning on doing 5 bins in each shelf (in an x) and using those to store movies, toys, kids books, diapers and sometimes toddlers. ;) Like I said, we just got to get back to Ikea to get more bins and figure out how exactly we want to lay everything out (Brooke! I need you!).
I love them. Josh did a really great job and we figure that we spent about $80 on each of them (not including tools we bought) AND they're solid wood. I have to hand in to Josh because he hadn't done much work with wood before and I think it sparked a little fire in him. He now wants to make a new tv stand (again, the one we have was bought when we were suuuper poor and it's a cheap, falling apart walmart stand) and shelves for our cold storage in the basement.
And I won't lie, it's a pretty attractive sight seeing your husband use his days off to build and take pride in something for our family. ;)
