My Shelves Are Floating (and Decorated)

Did you know that decorating your house is good exercise? Neither did I, until I began arranging stuff on the floating shelves that we recently hung over our couch. This involved climbing on and off of the couch approximately 14,026 times. Good workout, no? (No. The answer is really “no.” Jillian Michaels won't be snapping this up anytime soon.)

The fruits of my pseudo-cardio:

I think one of the things that appeals to me about shelving like this is that I can change it by rearranging/removing stuff whenever I want, and it won’t cost anything. So in the event that I get tired of my neighbors’ glass bottles being on display and/or frames filled with nothing, I can change it. I like décor that allows me to be fickle spontaneous.

I once did a U-turn on my way to work to snag pretty bottles out of someone’s recycling bin. It’s sick, I tell you.

The empty frames were all dysfunctional in some way, with the square ones having no glass, the oval one having glass that didn’t fit properly, and the rectangular one being an old corkboard. They also used to look like this:

It’s nothing a little spray paint can handle.

No, those aren’t the metal fasteners that held the cork in place! You’re seeing things.

The books are from yard sales. This ancient copy of Robin Hood was $1. I can almost picture some schoolgirl named Lottie reading it in her bloomers and bonnet whilst churning butter and using words like “whilst.”

Okay, maybe not. But that same girl probably also read this next book. Who doesn’t need to study up on their Contrapuntal Harmonic Technique of the 18th Century?

Apparently not the person who put it in a cardboard box marked FREE at their yard sale. But it sounded music-y and we’re music-y around here and, well, you must know that things marked “free” are too good for me to pass up.

The shelves themselves, of course, are from our recent trip IKEA. Rick used a metal drill bit to put new holes in them so that they’d be securely attached to the studs as opposed to sagging off the wall/likely to crash onto our heads while we watch Downton Abbey. He takes issue with the fact that IKEA’s predrilled holes aren’t spaced for use in studs. Swedes these days.

As for the rest of the living room: it’s a work in progress. We’ve painted for the third and final time (I got it right this time with Benjamin Moore’s Sea Foam) and replaced the ceiling, but we still need to hang the curtains, replace the trim with moulding that looks more like the rest of the house (it’s super-skinny builder’s grade; we’re not sure why the original woodwork would have been removed), hang a new ceiling light fixture, and replace the chair rail with something that also complements our future, more appropriate trim. I’ll share updates as they happen, but we don’t currently have a Plan for any of the aforementioned items…so don’t hold your breath. For now, I’m happy that we finally hung something on the wall in this house. We’ve only lived here a year.

What home projects give you a workout? Have you ever looted your neighbors’ recycling bin on garbage night? Are you familiar with 18th century contrapuntal harmonic techniques and/or butter churning?