Our Pine Shelves are Installed!

This post’s alternate title: “It’s Been A LONG Time Coming.”

Ever complete a project, step back and it seems like you can hear the angels singing?

Ever since the day we moved in and realized our faux-tolix barstools wouldn’t work with the kitchen counter overhang (overhang is too short/ stools are too tall), I wanted built-ins here under the overhang. However, given that we’re simply in an apartment and not in an owned home, I thought that we wouldn’t be able to install anything permanent or semi-permanent like shelves. So we got a few IKEA units (on sale in the as-is section) to act as a stopgap solution…

This looked OK– better in photos than it did in person, though. Since they were on carpet and hadn’t all been assembled identically, they kind of leaned back or forward from each other and didn’t look as neat and clean as what I had in my vision. So little by little the area underneath here was altered…

One unit was removed to make way for our turntable… then all three units were relocated to the west wall when we got our green couch and reoriented the whole apartment.

Now… Ahhhh. This is so much better!! They are only ten inches deep which actually gives us five more inches of floor space in that area when compared to the EXPEDITs. Five inches may not seem like much, but it’s almost half a foot, and the space is so much more streamlined, as the photo below makes clear. The pine warms up the space in a very honest way. Somehow, yeah, “honest” seems like the word for this simple solution. Here’s a few more shots:

I feel like purposefully leaving the area underneath the bottom shelf empty makes it seem light and creates the illusion of more floor space. The best part is that the project was affordable, there aren’t many screws in the wall, and the whole thing can be taken with us to our next place next fall! I will have a how-to and budget breakdown here for you Wednesday!