DIY: Nook Book Shelves and Benchtop

Remember how I mentioned that our carpenter had installed a few simple shelves in our nook to hold our TV components? I like the easy bracket system he had come up with, so I duplicated it recently when I wanted to fill out both sides of the nook with shelves.

I pulled off the old shelves, but kept the brackets and cut down 1x2" primed pine boards with a miter saw to fit the back and sides. The side pieces were finished off with a 45-degree angle cut.

The first bracket installation is the most important. Starting with the bottom most shelf, I made one measurement and mark on one of the walls. 

Then the most important part after that first measurement is to use a level to mark all the way around the nook to help you know where to hang the brackets. 

I used an 18-gauge nailer to hang the back bracket first, right on the line, and then the side brackets.

Once you have the first set of brackets perfectly level and installed, the rest of the measurements are easy. Just figure out the distance you want between each shelf, measure up from the bracket and make a little mark. If the first shelf is level, the others will be too.

When all the brackets were installed, I filled all the nail holes with spackle before giving the whole nook a fresh paint of gray paint.

I used laminated pine boards for the actual shelves. Home Depot cut them all to size for me and I stained them with half classic oak and half driftwood stains.

The pine boards are just sitting on top of the brackets, but I could have nailed or glued them in place if I was more worried about it. I'm so happy with how these shelves turned out. I really love the thicker, more chunky look!  

\

I don't know why installing shelves has sort of felt too hard-core for me up until now. It's a crazy simple project!

The bench solution was simple too! I didn't want to sew a box cushion, so I had a piece of 1/4" plywood cut to fit the seat area and used a coupon to buy a piece of 2" upholstery foam at Joanns.

The bench is wider than the full width of the fabric. so I had to seam the fabric. The pattern made it pretty easy to line everything up, and a really good pressing fixes even less-than-perfect seams. In the end it's pretty hard to tell where the seam is on the bench. 

I think the key to a really soft and fluffy bench top is a good, high-loft batting layer. I used my trusty handheld staple gun to attach the seamed fabric. I went a little overkill on the stapling so there would be no pulling on the linen. (You can see where I seamed the fabric on the right side of the bench here below - it's not that noticeable!)

I think the bench turned out nice. The pattern is fun and the seat is a comfy, inviting place now!

Have you made any shelving or bench tops yourself? Any tips you'd like to add?

Back-to-School Make Over for the Mudroom!

I really wanted to finish up our mudroom space before school started this year, and we made it, just under the wire! I was really excited to get to team up with Amana again on this project. You might remember that one of the first projects we tackled in our house after moving here was paneling in the mudroom. We held off on paneling the closet walls, just because there was a lot of work to do there first.

This was my rough plan for each of the cubby nooks:

I really wanted the nooks to be flush on the sides and tops, and I wanted to add some benches. So last month, I hired my handyman to come in and prep the closet spaces and then Kate and I installed and painted the paneling, just like in this tutorial. It's really not hard to do, it's just a little time-consuming.

The basic idea is we used inexpensive sheets of hardboard cut down at the hardware store to make shiplapping on the walls. The paint color is Benjamin Moore's Day's End in a flat finish.

I wanted the girls to each have a nook space of their own, complete with a bench and a high shelf for paperwork storage.

To help keep the floors in my house clean and to make it easier for the kids to get ready for school, we made separate nooks for jute shoe baskets. One is for casual shoes and the other is for dress shoes! It was a little tricky to find baskets that fit the nooks just right. These two were contenders from Homegoods, but the sizing was a little off and they were pricey (not to mention, I would have had to drive all around Phoenix to find six matching baskets).

And then I totally hit the jackpot at World Market with these Jessica baskets. They were 50% off, which made them only $12.50 each! They're made of really thick jute and so far they're holding up beautifully!

For the bench tops, I made a bench cushion using upholstery foam that I cut to fit the nooks. I made the fabric with drop clothes and fabric dye before sewing them into box cushions. My girls helped me with parts of the fabric painting, which made them so proud! They love getting to display their work in each of their cubbies!

The hooks ended up being a bit different from what I had initially envisioned (with a vertical row of hooks), but I'm so happy with these. I spray painted simple hooks from Target a bright acid yellow, which I think really pops against the navy paneling, and epoxied wooden craft balls to the ends to give each of the hooks a sort of Eames feel. 

I think the more hooks in a utility space, the better! The original vertical hanging idea would have been awkward anyway - things would have been stacked on top of each other. We keep all sorts of things on these hooks, from the obvious, like backpacks and lunch bags, down to swim goggles and binoculars! :) These hooks are doing wonders for my sanity - it's so easy for the kids to hang up their stuff now.

On the top shelf of each nook, I added labeled storage boxes that say either Artwork or School Work. My girls come home from school with adorable projects and work all year long and I love the idea of having an easily accessible place to store the most special of these keepsakes!

At the back of each nook, we installed a magnetic chalkboard for tacking up notes and writing messages! I made my own white chalkboard paint with latex paint and non-sanded grout and painted it on to a sheet of galvanized metal from the hardware store. We glued these sheets up to the drywall and paneled around them. It is wonderful for the girls to have a spot to leave each other and themselves messages every day! 

I dressed up super simple ceramic magnet circles and dollar store alphabet letter magnets by spray painting them all with gold spray paint! Making them all a uniform color makes them feel special and less cheesy. The little cupcakes are containers filled with chalk for the girls. We epoxied magnets to the cupcakes so they can stay up on the chalkboards.

Across from our cubby nooks, we made our after-school-snack pantry extra pretty by painting it a bright, poppy red. Inside we have snacks for my kids (and any of the neighborhood kids that stop by!), including fruit leather and granola bars, and snack-sized microwave popcorn (my girls favorite!). We actually keep our Amana microwave in this pantry, which makes popcorn an even easier snack!

I'm so happy with our (finally finished!) mudroom. It has made the back-to-school transition so easy and organized. I'd love to hear what things you're doing to help make back-to-school easier on you and your kids!

This post was a collaboration with Amana, a wonderful, eco-friendly company devoted to making life easier on families, one appliance at a time! :)

Kitchen Mini-Reno - The Cabinets

This week is a little crazy. Our church does a stay-away camp for hundreds of teenage girls in our area that I was asked to help with and that finally, after months and months of meetings and work, is happening this week. Balancing the end stage planning of that really fun project with all the recent house projects going on here has been a little tricky, but also so exciting! It feels like things are really starting to happen this week! The bookshelf installers came yesterday and they are a good halfway there and the other projects are ahead of or at least right on schedule. I only hope this pace continues until our big photo shoot deadline at the beginning of July (Knock on wood!).

So, the kitchen. Many of you have weighed in as I've bounced around different thoughts and plans. I've swung from wanting to do a full-blown-knock-down-tear-out kitchen remodel to "let's just leave it all as-is for another year or two and then renovate" - and every version of a remodel in between.

One of the first things I try to figure out about a new client before we start working together is their change tolerance. Some people need more time on decisions, some people move very, very quickly. Usually somewhere in between yields the best results. Unfortunately, I swing a little more on the side of "very quick" decision maker when it comes to my own house choices, which comes back to bite me sometimes. I've been trying to learn how to slow down and pace my decisions, but I am super comfortable with change. I'd love to move to a new house every year if I could! Or at least I'd love have a new kitchen every year if it wasn't so expensive and wasteful! :)

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I spent a little more time thinking about what I wanted to do in this kitchen than I might normally spend, and I still waffled right up to the very end on how much money and effort we should put in here. This room is a head-scratcher for me. It really, really bothered me how much I didn't like the room we spent a huge amount of time in every day. But I think we've finally figured out a longer-term plan that makes sense for the house and for us.

I'm sure you remember that we're going to need a new roof here in the next year or two. The roof (which is going to cost a ton) is higher priority than a fully brand new, re-worked kitchen. So we decided to spend the next 1-3 years putting our pennies away for a new roof and a new kitchen. And in the meantime, we'd do a Jenny style make-it-work remodel in the kitchen. Because of the photo shoot, I can't show you one or two angles, but I want to share a lot of the process with you over the course of a couple posts. We're about 90% done now and I can't believe how new the room feels! And it also feels bigger! A huge part of the change was removing the granite.

I really tried guys. I wanted to make this work, but it was a doomed relationship from the start. It's not you, Granite! It was me all along.

Slowly and carefully we scored and pried, and the granite was removed. The cut out parts by the sink and cooktop ended up snapping, but all the other lengths were successfully salvaged and are being reworked for another family's bathrooms.

And we used plywood to build countertop bases for concrete. I was really tempted to go with stone, but it was a pretty obvious choice to go with the concrete overlay. It looks great and it's CHEAP. Like less than $100 for all the materials required here (concrete, plywood, concrete color additive). Actually scratch that. The sealer I bought this time was about $100 alone, but it was worth the splurge. It's really good and it's food-safe, which is so important for a kitchen space, obviously. I'm totally getting ahead of myself though. More on concrete later.

After removing the granite, it seemed like a good time to have our handyman install a vent hood. There had been a downdraft vent at one point, so we just had to open up the drywall and connect the new overhead hood with the existing vent to the outside. It was so simple and I have been SO HAPPY to cook lately. :) No ventilation is bad, bad news, guys!

I wish the hood didn't show at all, but we only had a couple of inches to work with (the HVAC vents are right above this, so we couldn't get any more height - grrr) and this was the thinnest vent we could find for the money. It's worked out though - we ended up running concrete all the way up the back wall, so now it's a lot less noticeable. I'd rather have an inch or two of hood visible than no hood at all I guess.

You probably noticed the color change on the cabinets here. This is the primer coat, so it's brighter than the final color (Ben Moore's Swiss Coffee). We wanted to go with a really warm white to balance out the cool wall color (Titanium). The floors are probably going to get a change too. We had a few drips and spills while doing the cabinet frames and the concrete so we need to do touch ups anyway. Might as well go a little lighter.

The cabinets were updated with some L-shaped corner moulding, cut with my miter saw and installed with a really cheap pinner gun I got on clearance at Lowes. It took a full day to get just the moulding on (sooooo many cuts), but I love the cleaner look of the shaker style fronts. We saved a ton of money by going this route and salvaging the cabinet doors, drawers and frames, so it ended up being worth the effort.

I bought a new spray gun with a wider spray radius than the Critter. I will defend my undying love for the Critter til the day I die, but it does spray a little slower and finer than the bigger guns. I found this Grace airless sprayer at Lowes on clearance (they have the BEST deals on clearance tools!) and it's been pretty great. The airless feature means you don't need an air compressor. You just plug it in, fill the cup with paint and start spraying. I'm really happy with how fast it sprays and how smooth the finish is. This is the primer coat below, after we had sanded and caulked the new moulding.

After taking these photos, I sprayed a second coat and covered the drawer sides and glides on that pass, so everything is white now. It is such a clean look.

The cabinet frames are not the best, but they function and now they're much prettier. I'm waiting for the hardware still and I'll show some afters soon and talk more about the counters. We went with black and I'm pretty much in heaven with the combo of the dark counters and the creamy white cabs. Good stuff.

I'm so happy we decided to just make the big stuff work for another year or two. To me, a few days of hard labor and a couple hundred bucks are work it to have a prettier kitchen, even if it is just a temporary fix.