First Bookshelf

Lincoln and I love to read and we love books.  In the Seattle house we turned the walk in closet of what was supposed to be the master bedroom (but that we used as the boys room and guest room) into a mini library with built in shelves.  It had 12 foot ceilings and it was awesome!

This was a problem, however when we got to the Apple House.  We brought everything that was on those shelves, but not the shelves.  We looked into buying some bookcases and determined that the people who make particleboard shelves must be smoking pot and the people who make solid wood shelves must be doing crack.  GOOD NIGHT, shelves are expensive.

We have a no particleboard policy in our home, so we were left with one option, build some new shelves.

We used Ana White's Favorite Bookcase plan and shortened it to fit the space where we wanted it to go.  Then we primed it, painted it, and Link turned it over to me to distress and glaze.

Here she is.

I love the color.  It was an "oops" paint from HD.  Gotta love those $5.00 gallons, especially when they are such a pretty color.

The glaze is a light brown that I mixed myself.

We're very happy with how it turned out.  It is very sturdy, built all from planks and standard lumber.  We also added supports under the shelves to ensure their weight capacity was high enough to be loaded down with book.

And the best part, because we were able to use some lumber from the "cull" box at HD, the entire thing only cost us a little over $30.00.  Gotta love that!

We all ready have the materials for another shelf and will probably be building a few more after that.