What's on my mind? Bookshelves.

I found this blog (http://littlegreennotebook.blogspot.com/)  just as I was looking for book shelf inspiration. And there is a great post about "Book Shelf Styling". Sweet. And by the way, my usual research method usually includes one of these three things:

 1. Google image searches. I just type in the word or phrase or anything really related to what I'm looking for and I usually can get a pretty good picture.

2. Obviously, I get a lot of inspiration from blogs. Check the blogs on my sidebar to see which ones I follow regularly. And there are probably a ton more blogs out there with great things, I just haven’t found them; yet…

3. Magazines. Traditional Home mostly. Mostly, because that’s the only one I have a subscription to. I love others but rarely feel like paying $5 bucks for a magazine. Sometimes I do and then feel like I was robbed.

Here are some of the inspiration pictures from her post, I’m just copying and pasting these from her blog. In the blog world, I hope this is an OK practice. I have no idea. But I am referencing her blog and making it obvious I only found these images through her. So hopefully that's cool. Not that she would read my blog anyway, but you know what I mean. I'm babbling. So without further ado, here are the great inspiration images! Woo, I’m seeing tons of ideas in these pictures! Yee-haaaaw.

Aren’t these awesome?! We’ll see if I can get our shelves to look as chic as these shelves. They are so pretty! I’m gonna go with the power of positive thinking here, and say, our shelves are gonna be great!!! ;)



One Kings Lane

https://www.onekingslane.com/all-sales

This is a website that offers daily discounts on furniture, accessories, art and lots of stuff. I just found a great deal on an entry hall table. I’ve been knee deep in internet research for months. All the tables start at $200 then you have to pay shipping costs, which would make the whole thing like $300. Not cool. So today, finally, a great deal pops up! This table, is $99 marked down from $195. And the shipping is $8 bucks! So I jumped on it and bought it before it was sold out. That’s one thing to be careful with on this site and other’s like it. If you see something you like, you better buy it because there are limited quantities and will sell out in a matter of hours. A good selling strategy for the site I’m sure.

And, yay! Finally, we won’t walk into our empty hall way anymore. Literally there’s not one thing in there right now, besides our shoes. We’ve gotten in the habit of taking off our shoes in the entry hall mostly because our new white carpet looks so fresh and we’d like to keep it that way. And here are a couple images I’ll use as inspiration for when the table is delivered and it’s time to put that room together.

I wish our entry would like this...

but this seems a little too much to hope for...

but mayby not...

This is pretty charming too.

But we don't have half this space.

I like the umbrella stand and the blue & white china

We'll see where we end up! And I'll keep you updated. It looks like the table will be delivered between July 27-August 8. So, I've got some time to think about it. It's a small space. Looking for a great piece of (cheap) art. Anybody have suggestions?!



The Battle of Ikea, the Legend of the Beast.

This was a battle. This project took patience, time, energy, clever thinking, and did I say patience? Man, we finished this thing! And, bonus, Jay and I didn’t kill each other in the process. I feel pretty good about that. Seriously though, Jay and I celebrated last night this thing being complete. We ordered a thin crust pizza from Domino’s and drank a beer and sat on our couch and literally stared in wonder at our glorious achievement. And a few high fives were given. It was a sweet moment of accomplishment. I’m so relieved this is off our to-do list. This was a monster, nay a beast. And we fought it, and won. Go us.

I really feel now that the rest of the work for the condo is downhill. Please remind me that I said this, when I’m in the middle of some other project that’s driving me crazy. Here are our resluts:

Before - the blank canvas

The Beast - complete and now in possesion of an awesome nickname.

That before and after makes it look so easy. This is where we started. These 5 boxes.

Then the wood, screws, and washers...Oh my.

And finally, after evertything was built, as we're sighing relief, thinking our job was done, we were faced with the challenge of securing The Beast to the wall. Jay figured it out. I did not. I was lost and said "You deal with it". And he did. He went the hardware store and came back with screws and something that looked like aligator clips and the largest screwbit I have ever seen. The solution to our dry wall problem, was to make a big whole in the wall, put the aligator screw clip thing in, then when the screw is inserted into the clip (which is in the wall) it expands behind the dry wall. That's my explanation. And that's about as much as I can describe. Here's an action shot of that process:

Then, the bridge had to be secured to the newly reinforced bookcases. That wasn't too bad. 

And then, Tada, we were done.

Woohoo. Now, the fun part - putting all the books, baskets, picture frames, and as Jay calls them "nicknacks" into place. Here's a little preview, I got a couple shelves done last night. I'll update when the whole thing is done.

The items on the shelves, will no doubt propably change often. I could see this as an ever evolving wall of stuff. But for now, I'm pretty happy with the first three shelves. Whoop.

IKEA REPORT

Saturday morning we departed for IKEA with the goal of purchasing an entertainment center. And I’m happy to say we were successful! We knew well and good that the boxes for this monster piece of furniture would not fit into Jay’s car, so we preemptively  rented a U-haul to bring home our purchase.

While we were there, we also found another shelving unit, which we plan to use as a buffet. Here are some pics of the piece we bought and how others have used it. We got the black one. This will be some inspiration for me on how to use it:

 

And here are the pics of the process(we’re a little further along, but I haven’t snapped pics of exactly where we left off, but you can get an idea):

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you just went to IKEA, bought the furniture and then put it in your house and the job was done?! That would just be too easy. We spent 6, painful hours Saturday night putting our 5 pieces furniture together. Our knees and backs were sore from all the time spent on the floor working on our furniture. But anything worth having is hard work, right? There were a million parts for each piece and they all looked the same. And the directions, all though they ended up getting the job done, were like reading hieroglyphics.

Seriously, the instructions at times were ridiculous. My one suggestion to IKEA is that they should label or better indentify the wood pieces. The only way to currently indentify one piece of wood from another is the number of screw holes on each piece. And with each piece having somewhere between 8-15 screw holes it was frustrating figuring out which piece went where. Of course, sometimes it obvious what went where, but there was some head scratching and four letter words used and we even had to start over one or two times on certain steps…uff da!

Ha! This cartoon is funny, because it's true.

Anywho, long story short: here’s where we currently are. We have constructed every piece! Two bookcases, one TV stand, a bridge unit that goes between the bookshelves, and above the TV stand, and our extra shelving unit. Phew. BUT we still have to secure the book shelves and the floating bridge unit to the wall. Sound simple? Well, it’s not. Here’s the problem and if  you read this and know what we need to do, please, let me know! We have crown molding along the floor. Attaching the book cases, etc. to the wall will be tricky because the back of the book case is not straight on the wall - it sticks out a little due to the crown molding. Ya’ll understand what’s happening here? So basically the screw from the back of the bookcase would go into the wall but would have an inch or so before it went through the wall. And we have dry wall, so we’re concerned whatever screw we put into the wall has the chance of coming out and pulling the dry wall with it.  But once we figure this little problem out, we’ll be done! And I can’t wait.

I'll have what she's having

OK – seriously. I can’t get enough Kate & William. And it’s mind boggling how amazing the two of them are and how Kate is putting herself together and handling all of this. I mean seriously, how does she do it?

I’ll get back to condo posts soon. We’ve had a temporary hault in our progress due to a busy a calendar. But we cleared this three day weekend so that we could hopefully put our place in order. So posts next week about our progress. Otherwise, Happy Friday! And hope everyone enjoys their holiday!!! I wonder what Kate and William will be doing the 4th of July?