Left on the shelf

Last time, I posted I promised to reveal how I made the picture shelves for the stairs. And I am sure you have all been sitting there waiting to know how to do it. For. 3. Weeks.

3 weeks without posting. Phew!

So, where have I been? In Australia, working hard on a top-secret extra-special project, about which I shall ‘tell all’ in a coming post.

Now I am back again, and almost over the jet lag, I can tell you how to make picture shelves. They are remarkably easy, quick and cheap to make, and require almost no carpentry skills.

So much so, that you will wonder why you ever actually bought any, particularly as you can make them exactly the right size for your space, and not be dependent on the sizes the stores think you need.

But first an acknowledgement: my picture shelves are based on the plan and fantastic instructions provided by Ana White, on her website here.

Plan for Ana White’s picture ledges. Image source.

Her plans require no cutting at all, so are ultra basic. And perfect if you are happy with an 8 foot run of 4 inch wide picture shelves.

I, however, wanted something different and modified her design for three reasons.

Firstly, I had some lumber left behind by the previous owners that I wanted to use up. Free lumber is the best sort of lumber, right?

Secondly, I wanted to be able to cut mine to size, to create an interesting layout for our stairs.

And thirdly, I wanted to make them narrower than hers, not just because that was the size of my free lumber, but also because our stairs are not very wide, and I did not want us catching parts of our anatomy on them as we went up and down.

The shelves are made of 3 parts: a base, a back and a front. The base and back are made of wider boards, and the front is narrower trim, that stops the pictures from falling off.

My plan was to use my freebie lumber for the base and back, and I bought some trim for the front.

Freebie lumber and bought trim

The first task was to work out the layout of my shelves.  This would determine what size I should make them. For this, I needed to know the available wall space.

In this case it was the ‘triangle’ made by the stair wall and the hand rail.

Location for my picture shelves: above the stair rail.

I drew this triangle to scale on a piece of paper. And played around with different sizes and layouts until I found one that I liked.

The plan

Once I had done this, I had the dimensions I needed. That was when I realized I didn’t have quite enough lumber to do what I planned, and so modified the layout slightly. This is, of course, the other reason for making a plan.

Then I set to work, measuring and cutting.

Remember: measure twice and cut once. Use a square to make sure your cuts are nice and straight, and then everything will fit together perfectly.

Use a square to make sure your cuts are straight

For each shelf you will need two pieces of the wider lumber, and 1 piece of trim.

Shelves cut to size

The shelves are joined using simple butt joins, which are very easy to accomplish. Here is a dry run of my shelves before sanding or joining.

Do a dry run to make sure you have measured everything correctly

Next sand the shelves, and then you can join them.

Join your two wider pieces of lumber first. Run a bead of glue along one edge.

Then clamp the two pieces together in an ‘L’ shape. I placed this over the corner of my work bench, then drilled

drilling holes for the screws prevents the wood from splitting

And screwed the pieces together.

After the two pieces were screwed

The trim on the front I nailed in place using brads (small thin nails). I hammered them through the trim first, so they were just poking out the other side. This allowed me to more easily position the trim before hammering home the nails.

Pre-nailing the brads

Then it was a simple matter of lining up the trim, and hammering them in.

And voila, you have a picture shelf.

Finished shelf. Don’t forget to wipe off the excess glue!

You can punch the nails and fill the holes, if you want, but because it is fairly dark in our stairwell, I didn’t bother. If they were in a more brightly lit space, I would definitely have done this, as it gives a more professional-looking finish.

repeat until all done

Next up, you need to paint them. I used some of the matt black spray paint that I had left over from the bathroom cabinet and wall shelves.

Make sure you spray paint outside on a non-windy day. Those fumes are nasty.

Once they were dry, it was a simple matter of attaching them to the wall using stud solvers. These allow you to screw into dry wall, without the need to find a stud. They will hold up to 50lbs, which is fine for these shelves. I have written previously about using stud solvers, here.

And installed. Note that I deviated from my original layout, slightly.

My plan is to eventually find matching picture frames to put on them, plus the beloved and I are going to go through and chose some photos to use. I will update you on that once it happens. In the meantime, I loaded them up with the existing photos we already had framed.

After: completed picture shelves

The only thing I had to buy for these shelves was the trim, so they cost me around $8.00. And they took me all of 2 hours to make, from start to finish.

Less time than it would have taken to drive to Ikea or Target to buy some that wouldn’t have fitted my space nearly as well.

Less time, less money. Better fit. Perfect.

Swanning around

I had forgotten how time consuming it is to paint cabinets. You look at the object, and it looks relatively small, w-a-y smaller than a room, so it should be quick and easy to paint, right? Wrong!

Painting a cabinet takes at least as much time as painting a room, usually more. And you have to be careful with your brushstrokes, otherwise it looks like rubbish, which means you have expended ALL THAT EFFORT for something that looks worse than when you started. Plus there are lots of corners and fiddly bits and annoying parts. And you have to contort your body to get into the difficult places.

Let me tell you, lying in a strange position with your head in a cabinet, your arm crooked over your head and off to one angle, breathing in lungfuls of paint fumes is not for the faint-hearted. For the faint-headed, perhaps …

Before I get the OH & S police knocking on my door, I will now point out That Was A Joke. I only use low VOC paints, and I wore a fume respirator while painting the inside of the cabinet. Which, of course, only made the whole thing even more horrid. Have you ever worn one of those? Ewwww, ewww and eeeewwww.

You would think I would remember all this, having only recently painted the kitchen cabinets, but I think painting cabinets is a bit like giving birth. You forget how hard and painful it is until you are in the middle of it, and then there is no choice but to put your big girl pants on, and proceed.

So if you ask me what I have been doing for the whole of this week, I will say ‘Oh just swanning around painting a cabinet. For. A. Whole. Week.’ As you can tell, I am still a little bitter and twisted about it.

And boy did that cabinet need painting. The cabinet I am referring to is, of course, the Ugly Duckling (UD). Here is a close up of the fab finish on the UD before I painted it.

Classic late 60s finish. Glorious yellowy varnish, and what were they thinking with all those little black speckles?

First I removed all the handles. I would be dealing with them separately.

Then I washed the whole cabinet with TSP, then sanded before wiping it down with deglosser. There was no way the primer wasn’t going to stick to this baby! Next I masked off the glass on the doors.

Glass masked ready for painting

I really like this paper tape stuff that I found at the local paint store. One half is sticky, like tape, then you get that extra bit of protection from the paper part. Cool.

This means that I can slap the paint on like crazy, right? WRONG! You still have to be careful, and I have yet to find any sort of tape that doesn’t bleed. Yes, even that clever blue tape that the paint shops swear by. Hello, people?!?! It. Still. Bleeds. But scraping off small areas of paint on the glass, and touching up a few bits here and there is a whole lot easier than all that careful cutting in.

If I gone done the cutting in route I would still be painting the wretched thing.

I separated the two halves again, and set to work with the primer.

After priming

Looks better already, doesn’t it?

While the primer dried, I dealt with the handles. They also got a good washing, and then I primed them with spray paint primer.

Handles before

Handles after priming

My plan for the handles was to zhoozsh them up a little with metallic black spray paint. Here is what they looked like when they were done.

Handles after

Nothing like a coat of black metallic paint to make things look more exciting.

At the same time as putting coats of spray paint on the handles, I was layering up 2 coats of paint on the rest of the UD. So what color did I end up painting it?

Well orange was a very strong contender for a long time, but in the end, I decided to paint it in keeping with the rest of the shelving in my studio (ahem, garage). Benjamin Moore Abyss. I just love that color at the moment.

Here is the bottom after the first coat:

Bottom half after the first coat

Now it is starting to look better!

So Abyss again … but with an extra twist! But what twist? If you are open to it, inspiration comes in many ways, and my brilliant plan for the UD was no exception.

One of the things that attracted me to the UD in the first place was it’s excessively over the top molding on the lower doors and at the top of the cabinet. After all, why have molding, when you can have MOLDING?!

How deep is that molding? C-R-A-Y-Z-E-E deep

Don't you just love those dimply bits in the middle of that row of squares? Mad!

I am sucker for anything that is a little bit whacky and out there, and to me  all that molding just screamed ‘crazy’. Just painting the whole thing Abyss seemed a little too dull, for a piece as out there in ugly land as the UD.

Ah, the internet. How did we ever do anything before the world wide web? One of the big fads doing the internet DIY rounds at the moment is stenciled walls, particularly chevron stenciled walls.

Chevron stenciled wall. Image source.

While this is not something I am planning to try myself, I always love to see people doing something a little outside the box with their decorating. Life is way too short for beige, right? Right! I love the graphic two tone interplay here.

Anyway, I was perusing some examples of wall stenciling, when I had a light bulb moment for what to do with the UD. Ting! I realized that two tone thing was something I could apply to the UD, and that nutso molding was begging for it.

Then I remembered I had two quart- sized tins of Benjamin Moore silver metallic glaze that I picked up from the mis-tint section of the local paint store.

Always, always, always check the mis-tints. I got those tins of paint for less than half price. At the time I had no idea how I was going to use them, but they were too good a bargain to miss, and I knew at some point I would find something to do with them. And I was right.

The silver was too pale and creamy for what I had in mind, so I mixed some of the Abyss into it to get a nice dark silver.

Mixing paint

And yes, I checked the technical info on the metallic glaze before I did this, so I could be sure it would be ok.

I decided to paint the ditches between the molding silver, but before I did this I had to retape the UD, to mask off the parts I wanted silver.

Ready for silver detailing

Once I had two coats of silver on the appropriate parts of the UD, I pulled the tape off, reunited the two halves of the cabinet, then spent 3 hours cleaning up the glass, touching up the missed and bled bits and making sure it was as perfect as I could possibly make it.

So before I do the big reveal, here is a reminder of what the UD looked like when it first came home:

Before

And here it is now:

And after ...

What a difference a bit of paint makes. Now it looks as whacky as it really is.

Before I go, I will let you in on a little secret: all that molding? PLASTIC!

Yep, the UD is wood veneer with plastic molding. Bahahahaha! So, in doing a number on this cabinet, I broke all the rules in the upcycling book. They tell you that you only only only EVER upcycle solid wood pieces.

I chose something ugly and veneered and plastic and worthless to upcycle.  But isn’t that part of the point of upcycling? Isn’t it better off as storage in my studio (ahem, garage) than in landfill?

I was attracted to the piece in the first place for the brash nature of its hideousness, something that was somehow made even better by my discovery that the moldings were plastic.

Before I painted it, it was masquerading as an innocent wooden cabinet, but now it is Out and Proud. And, perversely, I love it more than ever.

So what is the ugly duckling doing these days? Swanning around in my not-finished-yet studio. This morning I am going to put it to use, and our over-stuffed kitchen cabinets will heave a sigh of relief.

And I will be one step closer to finishing my studio.

Totally marble-ous

I love it when serendipity throws things your way.

The beloved replaced some of the light fixtures (or light fittings as we would call them in Australia) in our kitchen and downstairs bathroom the other day (and there is a post coming on that in future). So we had 4 unwanted light fixtures to get rid of.

We could have thrown them out, but who knows, maybe someone might have a use for them? So instead of adding them to landfill, I took them down and donated them to our local salvage yard.

Now, I have remodeled enough houses on a low budget to know that you never EVER go to a salvage yard without having a good look around. You never know what gem you might find. They have new stuff coming in all the time.

I carry all of the measurements for things I want to replace or fix in the house in the notes section of my phone. That way if I do see something I like or need, then I know if it is going to fit and I can grab it.

So when I found two boxes of Carrera marble floor tiles tucked away on a bottom shelf among boxes of other dreary uninteresting tiles I whipped out my tape measure (yes I am a sad puppy who permanently has a tape measure in her bag), counted the tiles, did some multiplication, and realized that there was enough full tiles there to do the upstairs bathroom floor. Plus there were a stack that had been cut in half, and then a smattering of broken ones.

Two crates of marble tile, just waiting for me

Then I went into haggle mode. The beloved is much much better at haggling than me, but I have learned a few tricks from watching him in action. I knew by the layer of dust on top of these tiles that they had been there for a while. So I figured I was in with a chance for a bargain.

The tiles had a sign saying $1.60 each sitting on top, I found one of the guys that works there, put on my most winning smile, and asked him how much it would be if I took the lot off his hands. We settled on 75 cents per tile for the full size unbroken ones, and he threw in the others for nothing.

75 cents per tile for tiles that normally cost AT LEAST $7 per tile. $7 was the cheapest I could find them for on the internet. B.A.R.G.A.I.N.

Of course, when I got them home the beloved said he could have got them for 60 cents or less, but that was just his haggling pride talking. Actually, if he was there, he certainly would have got them for less, he truly is king of haggling, and I stand humbly in his shadow.

75 cents per tile instead of $7? That will do me!!

As it is I am doing a happy dance. Happy happy happy. That bathroom is going to look amazing with these tiles on the floor.

Before I get to the upstairs bathroom, though, I have so many other things to do. In the meantime, it is great to know that one of the items on our ridiculously long list of Things We Need For The House has been found.

Now I am off to file them in our undercroft until they are needed. Happy happy happy.