Craft Room Project: Putting In Shelves

Yesterday felt kind of like I was taking a break. In part because the day before with the cabinet install, I’d about done myself in and I was dragging hard core yesterday. I didn’t have the energy for much, so I focused on getting some residual painting done.

I also did my final stain test. Since I’d had to cut a section off one of the counters, I had the perfect opportunity to get a true test and I took advantage of it. I did the full stain and poly process to see how it would turn out and I have a winner and a final stain color.

The gray block on the right is what I’m going with, though I might let it sit just a little longer to get it a tad darker. You can see that it is lighter than the floor (bottom of photo), but that is what I wanted. I didn’t want to go as dark as the floor as I felt it would overpower the room. It compliments the floor, but still shows the beauty of the butcher block design. Even though I love this, I’m still nervous. Those counters make up a significant amount of space in the room and it would suck to get them all stained and end up hating it. I’m pretty sure I’ll be okay. I’m just having a harder time visualizing this in the space than usual. I’m not quite ready to work on the counters yet, but getting this done and set made me feel so much better now that I have a definite plan for them.

Today I finally started to get the shelves installed in their units.

As usual, it seems like I made the job harder for myself than it should have been, so this felt extremely tedious. I made several mistakes along the way. Some were easier to fix than others, but all are fixable. I got the first two units completed when I ran out of screws. I used the very last screw, the exact number I needed, on that second shelf. I guess the Universe was telling me it was time to quit for the day.

I have two more that I need to finish up tomorrow. Since I’ve been doing the needed filling and caulking as I go, I won’t have much to do to finish other than clean up those filled spaces and do a little sanding. After that, those base cabinets are done except the two that still need doors.

It doesn’t really feel like I got much done the last couple of days, but there is only so much this poor old body of mine is willing to do without a much bigger break than I’ve been giving it.