Anything On Paper

I am proud to say Project Shelf Makeover is now done! It took us three whole days to finish everything, from sanding the bookcase to painting it, sorting all our books, documents, CDs and trinkets and putting them all back to the shelf again. The whole project wasn’t only about refurbishing an old furniture, it also allowed us to re-examine what were the things that we needed to let go of in order to save space.

Before:

During:

After:

It’s no designsponge, but it’s a start, and I’m really proud of the improvement. 

The challenge of this whole shelf makeover thing is not painting the furniture itself, but sorting all our stuff, cleaning them, and putting them all back in the shelf. We have tons of books, CDs, DVDs and random shiznit, and we ended up putting half of them in a box to be sold in a garage sale. It was exhilarating to say goodbye to all those things that we deemed important before but are no longer useful to us now.

Found my old water colours and oil pastels inside the shelf’s bottom cabinet

Old film rolls that need to be archived properly

Goodbye old stuff! It’s time for a garage sale!

In putting things back together, similar to grocery shelf marketing strategy, you put the less used books at the top and bottom shelf and the often-read books at the middle shelf so that they are easier to take out and put back. Hence, my mom’s medical books and my old computer text books were put waaaay up at the top, while the general fiction and art books were arranged in the middle.

Ever since I started this project, I’ve been excited to further do some improvements in our place by looking around the house and checking what other furniture needs refurbishing and what part of our home is due for purging. We have tons of stuff to do then:

1. China/porcelain shelf in the dining room - 

2. Divider between the family room and the dining room

3. Magazine shelf

4. Kitchen cabinets

I know it will take a lot of time and money to rearrange everything and make things more pleasing to the eye, but I have the rest of the year ahead to plan this out. Plus, the whole creative process is so much fun!

Speaking of creative process, I spent the evening doing a mood board for the family room at www.olioboard.com. This is actually my first interior decorating mood board, and it’s so addicting. I love it. 

The couch, the shelf, the floor and the side tables are the key pieces that I have in the family room. I made sure that I kept the colors and textures intact in order for me to have a good gauge of what other things I can add to the room.  

Here are some olioboards that caught my eye! 

Go Red, Marilyn! by rrcmetro

Seaside Modern by rrcmetro

I think I’m gonna start making this a weekly exercise. :)

Today is the start of Project Shelf Makeover. The idea started when I bought a couch for the family room and noticed that the wall-to-wall bookshelf is still not painted nor varnished. I researched and bought paint that would complement the warm tone of our place, then my mom contacted our carpenter who would actually kickstart the actual makeover. 

So this morning, after deciding to take a leave from the office—my sister, my mom and I started to take out all the stuff from the shelf and sorted some of them for donation/keeping/garage sale. I was in charge of the CDs and DVDs as well as some of the pocketbooks. My sister and I unanimously decided that the textbooks from our academic years as well as the Danielle Steels had to go. I knew it was only part one, of the whole purging process and there are still TONS of work to do. The hardest part is actually letting go of all these things, but I was determined to go as minimalist as possible. 

Our random junk and all sorts of thingamajiggies. 

Kuya O’Neal, putting wood putty on the bookshelf.

Prepping time!

After emptying the shelf, our carpenters started masking the edges with wood putty to even out imperfections. Then they used sandpaper to smoothen the surface. They applied the first coat of paint in “Straw Hat”afterwards and let it dry. It took them the entire afternoon to putty, sand, and paint the whole thing. Even only on the first coat of paint, I already love the clean look of our book case. 

Voila!

We will continue the execution of Project Shelf Makeover tomorrow, but for the meantime, I’ve also been gathering ideas on how to spruce up the book shelf even more and take advantage of this whole “messy” set up and stumbled upon these great ideas:

All images below are from www.hgtv.com

Functional and Stylish Wall-to-wall Bookshelves

This interior decoration and home improvement stuff is seriously addicting. :)

The couch arrived this weekend and it fit perfectly into the family room. Aaaaah! New couch that can fit three to four people! I was thrilled to have it placed in the middle of the family room and discovering that it was the exact measurement of the space that it was meant for. I was trying to get used to the new sofa when I realized the shelf that we had in the middle of the room was still not painted nor varnished. Pencil marks are still visible on the custom-made shelf and I didn’t know how we got to this point where the shelf was apparently still unfinished but we’re already using it. I blame it on the fact that we’ve got too much stuff—books, CDs, DVDs and other random things that needed to be stashed somewhere. Looking at that shelf, it was exactly during that time that I thought: What if I painted this myself?

So I started doing some reading and watched several tutorials about painting furniture. It sounds like it’s an easy job:

1. Remove any screws and door hinges (if there are any)
2. Sand the wood
3. Clean the surface
4. Add primer
5. Paint
6. Let the whole thing dry

But of course I knew it wasn’t that simple. And given that the shelf that I wanted to paint was ginormous, I knew I couldn’t do it without any extra pair of hands. Future Faye will worry about that. Anyway, today I just did the first step.

I bought paint.

My mom, brother, sister and I went to True Value to buy some dog food and we saw a sign about a paint sale. I was openly talking to mom about painting the furniture, and my brother suggested that I take advantage of the sale. If I’m going to push through with the project, I will need to buy paint at some point, why not buy it now?

And so my sister and I picked a shade that would complement our place but would also put in a tiny pop of color. Our furniture is mostly made of narra, so the whole tone of the place is warm so we picked this color called “Straw Hat” which was basically light yellow. It looked good with chocolate brown which was the color of the couch that I recently bought.

Kuya started mixing the colorants with the base paint. 

So this is it. A start of a new project. I’m gonna have to plan a schedule for making this happen and gather more ideas on how to spruce up that shelf. Hopefully when our help Kuya Munding becomes available, I can kick start it already. I bought the paint and I would need to follow through with this makeover. Who knows, it could come in handy when I decorate my own apartment!

Here are some links I’ve been getting some ideas from:

http://littlegreennotebook.blogspot

http://www.designsponge.com/