Guest Post- Renewed Upon A Dream

Hello!  I'm Sarah & I blog over at Renewed Upon a Dream.  I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family & did as much (or as little) shopping yesterday as you wanted!  I am so excited to be here guest posting for Sarah!  She's kind of a superwomen, which I am not, but I have recently started doing quite a bit of furniture building, and I thought I'd share one of my recent builds here with you!

I have been in the process of updating my home office space lately.  It is a slow process, but it's getting there!  First I built a new desk to replace my old, childhood desk.  Then I created a new magnetic chalkboard out of a giant old mirror & a chalkboard tin to hold my colorful chalk in.  I loved my new pieces, but I really needed some shelving.  My little corner of the office wasn't big enough to add a whole bookshelf, so I had to get a little creative with wall-shelves.  I didn't want anything really plain, and I wanted them to have the feel & look of being old, even though I was going to make them out of new materials.  So this is what I came up with.

I ended up building large boxes to use as wall shelves.  I LOVE them.  I just got them up on the wall last weekend, so I haven't purchased any storage baskets to go in them yet, but I plan on filling these shelves with crafting materials & my ever-growing collection of spray paint.  It is going to be so great to have them all in one space up off the ground, rather that in the spare bedroom all over the place like they are right now.  I can't wait.

So, let's get into how I made these.  First, I figured out what size boxes I wanted that would fill my wall.  I had originally wanted 3 shelves, but when I measured my wall & figured out what that would look like, I discovered that 2 was going to fit much better.

Here are the supplies you need to build these boxed shelves:

2- 1x12 boards @ 4 feet long

3- 1x4 boards @ 8 feet long

nails

saw

4 brackets

screws to anchor them into the wall

My boxes started with two 1x12 boards that were already cut to 4 feet long.  These boards were used as the bottom of each box.  The sides are all 1x4 boards.  The 1x4s came 8 feet long.  I cut these into 4- 4 foot long boards for the front & back, and 4- 9.75 inch long boards for the sides.  I hammered the front & back panels into the bottom board, then the side panels were just hammered into the front & back boards.  Here's what I ended up with.

Aren't they pretty!?  Pretty much the easiest build ever.  I had decided that I wanted these to look old, and white-washed.  But I didn't think I wanted to just white wash directly on the wood, it just didn't seem like it'd pop very much.  So, after sanding them down, I first stained the boxes with my Minwax Dark Walnut stain.  I just wiped on the stain with a  trusty cheep-o sponge brush, then immediately wiped it off with paper towel within a minute or so.

A few days later, I set them up to be white-washed.  I had some leftover paint in my little sample pot of Behr Linen White from my recent dry sink project, so I left that paint in the pot & filled the rest of the pot up with water.  Stir it up, give it a good 5 minute long shake, & I was ready to go!

I set my boxes up on cups to make it easier to paint them.  I did the top & inside of the boxes first, then after they dried, flipped them over to do the bottom.

I pretty much just slapped the paint on them.  It took hardly any time at all.  I wanted it to look a little sloppy, with lots of brush strokes & stain showing through.  I LOVE how they turned out.  The paint just looks amazing to me.  What do you think?

Once they were all dry, I got the brackets up on the wall & got them up.  I procrastinated a bit on doing this because I wasn't sure how to make sure they were level since they were so long & heavy, & I debated getting a laser level, but I figured it out & made it happen without one.  I ended up using brackets, which I got from Home Depot, as well as screwing the boxes directly into the wall for a little extra hold.  Now they are sitting all pretty on my wall just waiting to be filled!

I am so happy with these shelves.  They turned out exactly as I had hoped.  I will be working on filling them up soon!  If you're curious to see how I decorate & use them, feel free to stop my my blog and say hi!  I will be doing a post on that soon!  I look forward to seeing you over there!

Thank you so much Sarah for posting my guest post!  You are amazing!!

Thanks so much Sarah! Those shelves are awesome. I wish I was a builder but am a chicken when it comes to saws.