the nursery: built-in shelving

 Time to build some stuff!  As you may recall, we painted the walls and trim and then refinished an old dresser for the nursery.  And now for the main event, the center piece of the room, the vision I've had in my head for months.  As in, before I was even pregnant.  My vision was built-in cabinets and shelving on the wall where the crib was going.  I also pictured an accent wall between the shelving to spice it up.  We thought about buying shelving from Ikea but ultimately decided to make them from scratch (except for the cabinet part) so it would fit perfectly.  Here's what it looked like before:

 On a Friday night, we took our date night to Home Depot and bought our supplies.  Romantic, huh?

We bout pre-made wall cabinets (not base cabinets) from Home Depot that are 24" wide and 12" deep.  We liked the idea of hidden storage space and not 100% shelving.  We figured we could stash toys in there that are easy to reach yet don't clutter the room.  Since we didn't want them directly on the floor, we built a base for them to sit on using 2x4s.

After the bases were built, we flipped the cabinet over and secured it to the wall.  I went ahead and painted the wall where the built-ins were going to avoid cutting in on every shelf down the road.

Then we built the bottom of the first shelf using 2x12s.

Then we made the frame of our shelves using 1x12s.  It looks really flimsy here (which it was) but we knew we would be securing it to the wall and then making shelves which would reinforce it significantly.

See where this is going?

 Can't you just see a little crib between there with an adorable baby sleeping?  Not yet?  Okay, keep reading.

Next we started building the actual shelves like so.

We ended up making the bottom shelves the tallest and then all the other ones shorter.

It's starting to look like a bookcase now!

We put some high quality trim pieces (1x2s I believe) to finish off the shelves.  These hide the small pieces of wood we used to make each shelf and made everything look solid and cohesive.

I threw up some of the decorative stuff I plan on using just to get a feel for how things will look.  I'm pretty excited about having a place for books, pictures and random ceramic animals that I just love. 

It doesn't look like much right now, but with the accent wall and baseboards and crown molding to tie it all together, it will look stellar.  I just know it.  Now we can say that we have built shelving by ourselves and it's giving me ideas and confidence for our "formal" living room downstairs.  Ehren is so excited.