DIY Shelves

Before my family came for Christmas I went into serious organizing/decluttering mode.  Part of that process involved getting rid of our T.V. stand so we would have more floor space.  In order to have a christmas tree this year we had to rearrange our entire living room.  The set up before was very open so I thought I would hate the new set up but I loved it.  It gave us a lot more options for our walls and ended up making our living room feel bigger.  We also had a giant wall to hang our T.V. on!  Then the problem of where all our T.V. accessories would go came up.  Trevor wanted to leave the tv stand for them and I was completely against that for obvious decorating reasons.  Unfortunately all this was happening during a financial drought.  It turns out that graduation is not cheap and when you have Christmas in the same month and scholarship money stops coming in, well it was bad. So we didn't have many options.  Then Trevor started doing some sketching and online shopping and some sort of wizard math and figured out we could make some shelves to hold everything for about 40 bucks!  We had some graduation gift cards so of course I was on board.  And my wonderful neighbor and visiting teaching companion let us borrow their electric saw.  The project took us about a day and a half and there are some things that could have been better had we waited until we had more money but overall I love the way these shelves turned out and with all the extra wood I am having fun making things to hang on our wall!

                                               

When I imagined this project in my head I thought it would be so easy.  It was not at all.  Trevor sketched everything out with measurements and then made paper sized cut outs of our T.V. and shelves to see where we wanted everything to go.

I know it looks like he did all the work but I was helping and I did the staining :)

Knox loved this process and we found him a few times with the hammer trying to help.  

We had the grey rug (above) for just under a year but it was already coming apart.  One day I headed over to Costco while Trevor was sleeping to see if they would exchange it and they did!  I decided to try a white rug which I know is a terrible idea but I love the way it all turned out.  And guess who put the first stain on the carpet!  ME!  Dropped a whole slice of pizza sauce side down.  So now it is officially broken in.

Im trying to catch up on my blogging since I'm a month behind and this makes me miss my christmas decorations.  It looks  bare now.