Father’s Day Present

I promise this isn’t turning into a diy/project blog… mostly ‘cause Josh would kill me if I kept doing projects! :)  But I’ve had a lot of free time, so I’ve been making myself useful!  And, one of those ways, was by making a Father’s Day present for my dad.

See, when Josh & I came to look at houses in April, we saw these shelves in our realtor’s office, and I thought my dad would like them.  They were simple, just dark wood with some reader’s digest condensed books attached to them.  So, we thought we’d try making some for Father’s Day…

I started with two 2 1/2 ft 1x6’s and some red mahogany stain that I already had.  I stained both boards, and learned that staining is not my strong suit! And that we need some sawhorses…

 

See the giant white spot on the one on the left… yeah, like I said, stain not my strong suit.

While I stained, Josh and the girls enjoyed the beautiful weather! :)

  Once the board were stained, I gave them awhile to dry, and then got the rest of the stuff together. 

A stack of 8 Reader’s Digest books (totally worthless as books, but neat looking… thus perfect for making into a bookshelf!).  I went for a blue scheme, shocking, I know!

I found mine at an antique store in Glendale.  One booth had a giant tub of them for $1 each… except that when I went to get them they were half off, score!  I messed up, though, and accidentally got one with red on the spine instead of blue.  It looked totally out of place, so I set off to find a replacement.  That involved about an hour going through the biggest antique mall I’ve ever seen (Peddler’s Mall here in Etown), which was NOT a sacrifice- look at tons of random stuff during a kid-free hour?  Yes, please!  Anyway, these books are fairly common, and not really worth much, so they’re not expensive!

You’ll also four 6 inch L brackets.  We got our’s at Lowes, and then I spray painted them oil rubbed bronze (almost as shocking as the blue theme), because I figured they’d stand out less against the dark wood.  And I forgot a picture, but not too interesting- four L brackets, lay them out, spray paint them, let them dry. 

We also used screws (obviously), which we had leftover from the fence project.  And, I highly recommend a doting husband to do the muscle work! :) 

So, the first two books were pretty simple.  I held the book down, while Josh put the screws through.  We repeated for the second side of the first shelf, flipped it upside down, and the books fell off.  Yeah… not cool. 

Turns out, the first two books we grabbed were the thinnest, so the screw went through both and into the wood.  All of the rest of them, not so much.  So we improvised- we used shorter screws to attach the first book, and then used the longer screws to attach the second.  We put the shorter screws perpendicular to where the L bracket would go so we wouldn’t run into each other. 

Repeat, times 2, and we were done.  The finished product ended up looking like this:  

And, what was Miss E. doing while we were working?  She was making friends with the little boy next door.  She’s definitely her father’s daughter!! :)

So, there was another attempt of mine at being crafty and DIYing something… I learned I’m not very good at staining, but I think they turned out alright.  They’re not really made for holding heavy things, but they look cool.  We sent them back to MO with James and Ruth after their visit this week, and Dad seems to like them, so we’ll call that a success!