My Latest Brainchild...

This is the boring old bookshelf.
We've had this bookshelf in our house for the last couple of years. We bought it unfinished from Lowe's. My husband Dave wanted to stain it a nice, rich mahogany, which we did...but, truthfully, I've never liked it. It came without one of the knobs, which we never got around to replacing, and always drove me crazy. It did however, do what it was supposed to do, that is, hold a bunch of books, most of which were textbooks from Dave's seminary classes, or books I picked up free from the JQ prize closet. And most of which, would never be looked at again.
So, I decided to take this useless thing, and turn it into something really cool!
I took all the yucky stain off with my new toy, the orbital sander. I really enjoyed the sanding part, but I did not enjoy removing the dust with the sticky tack cloth, over and over again.






More prep work...
Whenever I'm invoved in a big project like this, the wise words of my mother always run through my head, "if you're going to do something...take the time to DO IT RIGHT!" Mom, I sanded between everysingle coat thanks to you.










This is me with my all-time favorite purchase ever! The Ingersoll-Rand paint sprayer. I have used this to paint everything in my house. The last bookshelf we had, that was mahogany stain, is now lime green! The sofa table, that used to match the bookshelf...is now a beautiful shade of bright blue. And the cute end table that again, used to be part of the set which was also mahogany, is now a hot orange. I even painted the oak kitchen table, that one, however, was a mistake! Dave stopped me when I told him I wanted to paint the maple kitchen cabinets. He said, "what did wood ever do to you?"

HOW CUTE IS THIS???

Okay, so you may have been wondering what I have been doing to this poor bookshelf. I needed a little computer desk for my new laptop computer. So, I had this brainchild of an idea, to add a shelf that extends out 6 inches, so I could use it as a desk. Isn't that brilliant? I dumped all the boring old books, made Dave take his seminary stuff to his office at church, and VOILA! I have an organizational center for all those bills, flyers, and Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons, that seem to come every other day. Of course, I spent about 60 bucks on organizing stuff from Real Simple. I love all the coordinating drawers, folders, and filing systems. Dave says if I spend as much time actually organinzing stuff as I do, painting the organizing center and picking our coordinating filing equipment, we'd be the most organized family in the world!
So, I could't have done this without a little bit of help from my oh-so-helpful husband. If you want his perspective on my brainchild of a project...check out his blog at nothingcanseparate.blogspot.com