The House Shelf

I have to admit that I am a Pinterest addict. So of course I have a board devoted to each room of the house. For my daughter's room I found several little house shelves like this one. I immediately fell in love. But of all of the ones that I could find that you could actually buy, the least expensive I found was around $80. And they all go up from there. That just isn't in our decorating budget. So I sadly resigned myself to not having one. Until a recent trip to our local thrift store, and I found this diamond in the rough.

With the shade of wood and especially the blue wood panels it just screamed "country." Which is absolutely not what I like at all. But I knew with a bit of paint and cute fabric on the back, I could get this to look how I wanted.

First thing I did was to pull off the blue panels. They were stapled on so they were pretty easy to pull off. Then I wiped the whole thing down really well to get all the dust off. That was the only prep I did because it was bare wood. Then I used a paint+primer and just sprayed the whole thing a couple of times. Then to add a bit more charm I dug through my fabric pile and came up with a few pieces that I thought went well together. I quickly stapled those on the back, hammered on a sawtooth hanger, and put it up on the wall.

It turned out quite well if I say so myself. It was also very inexpensive. After using fabric I already had, the total cost of the shelf and the paint I had to buy came to a total of about $8.  You can't beat that!

I put a couple of my daughter's little toys on, and placed it next to the butterfly plaques I made a month ago. I'd say that her room is coming along well. Slowly but surely.