Our living room had an awkward space on one side of the fireplace. It measures 4 ft. wide and 28" deep not including the depth of the mantel. For a while we had a cat tower in the space, then I moved a shelf under the Red Rocks picture, then we made a spot for Jesse to play his guitar but it wasn't quite right. Loving built-ins and apparently things I can dust, I decided shelves would be the best addition. This would also be a good fit because I at some point wanted to move our TV over the fireplace and it would give somewhere for the Xbox and surround sound unit to go on.
If you have read any of my other posts you can get a sense that I sometimes do projects on the fly. I might have an idea in my head for a while but then I'll suddenly out of nowhere decide it's time to execute. On that note, one morning while Jesse and I were having coffee on our balcony, I decided we needed to do the shelves and it was reclaimed wood we were going to make them out of...like that day. After all, we like the different and unique so out of the box shelves wouldn't do the trick.
So there we are on the balcony, I started searching online for some places that sold reclaimed wood around Denver and found a place out East(unfortunately they are no longer in business).
It was a gorgeous day so out we drove to have a look at what they had. Immediately some old tongue & groove boxcar floors caught our eye but turned out, they were EXPENSIVE. I try to keep our budget down on our projects as much as possible and the boxcar floor cost about $28/board foot so we were talking almost $500 at the end of the day. No thanks. We walked around trying to find something else that would work but it seemed when we would find a good option that worked for the depth we needed, they wouldn't have enough or it would be long enough but not deep enough. We toyed around with the idea of putting 2 boards together to make the depth we wanted but we kind of felt like we were starting to force it.
Then a miracle happened. A woman came over and said she thought she had seen some of the boxcar flooring in a storage area that they keep closed to customers. She warned us that it wasn't in good shape but if we wanted to look and found pieces we liked, she would sell it to us for cheap. Cheaper anyway...$12/board foot. So, she and another employee took us back, she left us to poke around with the other employee and after searching for a while, we found perfect boards that were the depth that we needed and were looking pretty darn good. Doesn't get better than that. Once we pulled them out of the trailer and she saw the boards we picked, she didn't understand why they had been hidden away in storage since they were pretty decent looking. She still sold it to us for the cheaper price which we thanked her tremendously for but she was not too pleased. And by "not too pleased", I mean she was pissed and trying to keep her cool. She even tried to blame it on the person she left us with like it wasn't her idea to show us the wood in the first place. Our new best friends cut the boards into the 4 ft. lengths and home we went.
Those boards were heavy! Each one weighed around 45 lbs. so we knew that once it was time to hang them that it might get interesting but, first things first.
They very obviously needed a good cleaning so I scrubbed those suckers down. At first we didn't know how we felt about the yellow stripes on them and whether we wanted to sand them away or not.
How beautiful is that piece of wood?
I used our handy dandy mouse sander on each board with a 120 grit paper. I should have started with a 60 or 80 and moved up which would have given me just a little bit of a smoother finish once they were totally sanded but it all worked out. The worst that happens now is a rag may catch a little on a spot or two during dusting but they're smooth when you run your hand across them. I ended up not sanding the yellow stripes completely and I'm glad I didn't, they turned out pretty cool once they were stained.
Staining is always a quick process. To get both sides, we leaned them up against the wall in the garage. Painted it on, let it sit for a minute or two and wiped it off with a cotton cloth. We let it dry for a little bit and then turned them over to do the opposite side. I used the Varathane Premium Wood Stain in "Kona" which has become one of my favorite colors for stain.
One side of the boards were more "torn up" than the other....character! Depending on which side we used to face up on the shelves, it would give us a different look. We ended up using the more beat up side to face up because they were just too old and cool to waste it facing the floor. The beat up side is in the picture above and the nicer side is shown in the pictures below.
They were looking absolutely gorgeous and so far this project was EASY!!! For the finish, I did 2 coats of polyurethane and did not sand in-between coats. I wish I would have researched my options a little more because if you read about our wood shower floor or hardwood floors in our family room, my new favorite finish is oil.
It was time to tag team Jesse in to hang these things. Again, they were super heavy for a shelf and I had a few kind of heavy things I wanted to put on them, so he had a good task put in front of him.
We tossed around the idea of doing floating shelf racks. The weight capacity and length needed made the cost quite high. Problem solving and being resourceful is sometimes what we do best. Home depot had shelf brackets that were intended to have a shelf placed in-between the top and bottom pieces and the weight capacity was 66 lbs. for a pair. Once we modified them a bit, they were perfect. The brackets had a metal slider at the back that adjusted the top piece to whatever shelf height was being used. Ours at almost 3", were too tall so we cut off the metal slider and top piece and painted them black. The plan was to use 4 brackets per shelf(since we cut the top piece off) which would give us the support we needed and then some. Not to mention the anchors we used on the brackets not going into studs which on their own were supposed to hold 75 lbs. The sturdiness was Jesse approved.
The other neat thing about the brackets that we bought was they had room to make adjustments for leveling them once they were attached to the wall. Don't get me wrong, you still have to hang them level but if they are off just a little, it gives some wiggle room to make it perfect.
We took turns rock climbing up the wall on the brackets just to make sure they would hold and they passed. Jesse was a trooper working late to make sure they got hung before we went to bed.
Don't mind the smashed drywall as one shelf may not have cooperated when being installed and put Jesse in a shoving kind of mood. The room has since been painted so the evidence of the incident was spackled and is no longer visible.
We made the tongue & groove face in or out on every other shelf. Since the highest shelf can't be seen from above, we put the pretty side face up on that one so that from underneath it still matched the others.
I might say this about everything we do but, I am IN LOVE with these shelves, they are so us. The space looks intentional and complete instead of just having "stuff" put in the corner.
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