We Built This!

or the past several weeks I've been trying to come up with a solution to a problem in our house.  The problem being this.

Crafting and sewing takes space and we have a lack of that here.  As a result everything ended up on my kitchen table.  When it was time to put it away it would get stacked on the ironing board and our little freezer or the floor and was a complete mess.  The more I acquire the worse it gets.  See that box on the stool?  It's the box that frozen chicken breasts come in from Costco and it's holding all my fabric, nice hey?  There's too much of it so the flap won't stay closed.

I knew I wanted some sort of shelf but shelves are expensive.  Plus everything these days is that crappy laminated furniture and I've decided I'm not buying that stuff anymore.  I'd finally come to the conclusion that I'd have to wait and look at garage sales for something I could make work but then one day this post came across my Google Reader.


She had made these two amazing shelves for $60 and it was exactly what I wanted.  Not only had she made them but she had included plans so that others could make them.  Brad and I talked about it and decided that yes, using his Dad's workroom we could make one of these.


 


We headed up to Calgary and declared we weren't going home until this shelf was built.


It surprisingly turned out even better than we thought it would, ended up being really solid and I didn't even hate painting it as much as I had thought I would.  We made one small mistake that required a quick second trip to Home Depot but it was a cheap mistake.

Somewhere in the process this project became sponsored by Starship's, We Built This City.  On more than one occasion during painting I would exclaim, "We Built This!"  Which was inevitable followed moments later by, "We Built This City, we built this city on rock and roll"



Before we started I priced out all the supplies we would need and she's obviously in the States because it was not going to be as cheap but we were able to use a scraps from my Father-in-law and some of his supplies.  We figure our total cost was about $35 but there were lots of little things we didn't have to buy.  We didn't need to buy nails, wood filler, sand paper, paint brushes or varathane to protect the top and most importantly I have an awesome Father-in-law who bought our sheet of MDF.  You can only buy them in full sheets even though we only needed half so it was going to be a big expense.  We were hoping to use some scraps that were on hand but nothing worked right so he offered to buy the sheet and keep the scraps, that ended up saving us a lot.  We did buy spruce 1x2's for the trim, wood glue and paint.

The baskets for the shelf were a whole other story... no matter how I priced it out I couldn't make it cost less than $60 and that was with them being 50% off at Micheal's.  So most of the cost came in the form of $75 worth of baskets but I love them.  They also didn't have enough of the ones I wanted so for now I have 4 dark brown ones and 2 light ones but I'm going to try to get two more dark ones.

So here is the shelf!  I'm so proud of how it turned out!  Every thing you saw in the last picture is now in one of those baskets, they hold so much!

And here's a before and after together so you can see what a difference it has made.

I feel a little bit like Superwoman and I think I can now do anything.  Do you need a house built?  I'm pretty sure I could do that.
L