Shelfy Nook

FINISHED!  Finally.  This was like four days' work, and it took me a month. Whew! Procrastination is hard. 

 

Back to the beginning:

I started working on this nook in December  (see this post):
I  removed rotted and sagging shelves and plastic shelf clips which were painted and caulked into the wall, repaired the resulting wall damage, primed the walls and gave it a first coat of paint. 

When I painted the living room over the holiday break, I also installed these supports (1x1/4" pre-primed trim molding) and painted them in with the wall color when this wall got a second coat of paint.

Like a billion years later, I finally got the wood for the shelves out of the back of my car where it had been since December, cut it to size, and attached more (untreated) trim molding to the fronts.

Wood conditioner ftw.  I've never used it before, but WOW it made a difference. The stain went on so smoothly, only took a single coat, and sanding was minimal.

The stain is Minwax's Deep Walnut.  I'm a Jacobean girl from way back; this time I was looking for something with a little less of a green undertone, but not so warm that it bordered on reddish. This was perfect.

P.S.: stainable wood filler my ass. SO much work covering the nail holes on the fronts and getting them to blend in. Sigh.

I am loving the way these turned out.  I should have used a wider trim facing on the fronts of the shelves, so that they would completely cover the struts on the walls, but, live and learn, right?

The last thing was to deal with this nasty 30yo+ a/c return air cover.  It turned out to be a lot less work than I'd anticipated.  I removed it, banged it back into shape with a hammer (from the back), cleaned the gook off of it with my bike cleaning spray (AWESOME) then hit the whole thing with a couple of coats of plain, white, hi-gloss spray paint.

Hilariously enough, there was no filter behind this cover, and nowhere to fit one - the edges of the wall behind the cover are all crumbled and corroded, and when I tried to wedge a filter in place, it just fell flat.  I ended up zip-tying the filter to the cover to keep it where it belongs. Thankfully, it doesn't show:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 


I LOVE the way this all came out. :)

This Week In Laura

What have I done since I posted last? 

• fuck all
• watched a crap ton of Planet Earth and Life because David Attenborough
• stood at the bus stop in 22º weather in the dark at 6am wearing all of my clothing at the same time
• and then promptly (finally) took my car to the vet, because hell no

Okay, actually, I have done a bit of stuff around the house.  Mainly this:

Remember this shelfy nook in the living room?  It was not fabulous.  It still isn't, but I've been working on it slowly...

The shelves were on itty bitty plastic shelf clips pushed into the wall - some of them were glued (caulked?) into place, and all of them had been painted over a few times.  That made getting them out of the walls a damaging process.  Poor walls.

There is a LOT of spackle on these walls, you guys.  Spackle, patch, putty...lots of sanding and patching and sanding and patching and sanding and patching, and then finally retexturing. 

Two coats of primer.

Finally, the paint:  Sherwin Williams' Tradewinds.  It's a lovely color inside the Shelfy Nook, but it came out blotchy and weird on the walls, because I didn't prime first.  I know better.  It just happened, okay?

Mostly this was a test to see how the color looks in the living room.  You remember the Comfortless Gray issue I had in the entry way, after all.  I used Tradewinds in Sylvan's bedroom, and it looks fantastic in there - exactly the color I wanted to paint every single wall in the entire house.  But was it? Different light, different walls, different everything.  So this is a test area - I also did some large patches on three other walls in the same color, to see how looks at different angles and in different lights.  I'm happy to say I luuuurrrrve it. 



So what's next?  Well, the Shelfy Nook wall needs a second coat, and the entire living room needs to be primed and painted (and when I say "living room", I mean "living room plus two hallways and the dining room and entryway", because they're all connected). 

As for the Shelfy Nook itself, I have plans for that thing.  Oh, boy do I have plans.  Just wait and see.