New Shelves!

I never knew how gratifying it would be to create shelves. It was a process that involved, blood, sweat and possibly some tears, but I managed to finish my shelves for the office over the weekend. By the time I was finished, I really thought that maybe I deserved a medal or a trophy or something... or that could've been the fumes from the stain...

I had to stain the other two boards and then coat them with a finishing wax. Now, I've never used finishing wax before. It was more of an experiment than anything else to see if I liked the product, I knew I could strip off the finish and use regular polyurethane if needed.

Our sunroom made for a great workroom because I didn't care if the floors/walls ended up with stain on them and the majority of the room is made up of windows - so it provided good ventilation. We also have a little electric fireplace in the room so I didn't get too cold. Then again, the weather over the weekend was perfect, so I only needed to use it the one day.

I'm still up in the air over the wax. While it has a nice finish that's not super shiny, it was kind of a pain to work with, especially since I was working with wood that wasn't perfectly smooth. I think next time (unless I have perfectly smooth wood) I'll use a satin polyurethane as it's easy to apply.

However, the wax hardens in half an hour which made the finishing process a lot faster than I anticipated.

One shelf down... two more to go.

Yeah!

I wanted there to be a larger space on the bottom-most shelf, but I can always change the amount of space between if I feel like it. I think it will look awesome once I get everything on there. This week we have a few smallish projects to tackle - including filing all of our paperwork in our very large cabinet - so it might be a while before I get it "styled" how I would like.

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I like the color that I picked to spray the desks. Hm, I may end up having to re-think that.

I ended up loving these shelves so much that I bought a few brackets and a board to install in the kitchen. That board needs one more coat of stain on the one side and a coat of wax - I should be able to have it finished by tomorrow night. Finally a place to put all of my cookbooks!

We still have one 6 ft. board left that we're not exactly sure what to do with. We may end up cutting a piece off and using it in the bathroom as a display shelf (our bathroom needs some serious lovin') or something like that. Since we're miles away from any projects in there it might be a while before we make a solid decision on that.