We've Had It Over A Year...Probably Should Get Started

August 2010 Ricky and I purchased our first home. Up until now I've shied away from doing any sort of major home improvements/decorating because I'm not used to something like this being 'mine'. Anytime that I would want to do something major, I would think about how I don't know what I'm doing, and I would feel like I needed to enlist someone's help. I often would ask for help from family and friends, but the timing would rarely work out and nothing would ever get done. The only thing that we have done in the last three years was paint the walls, and we didn't even get them all done before we moved our furniture in. The blue painter's tape is still up in our kitchen from 2008 when we moved in to rent!

Thanks to Pinterest I have had quite a bit of motivation to get some things done around this place. I finally made my mind up that I was going to renovate our house by myself (with Ricky's help, of course!) If something went wrong, I'd learn how to correct myself.

So, with a lot of pinning and searching, I decided that the first problem/project I wanted to tackle was our overflowing dvd collection. I wanted to have a ceiling to floor shelf built. I went around to some stores to price racks and they were in the hundreds of dollars and they wouldn't even hold much. We already have two $300 500+ dvd racks and we still needed more space. So, a few days ago I let Ricky in on my thought process. His first reaction? "You know I'm not a handyman, right?" Ugh.

I gave him my 'We're going to do this and it will be awesome, or we're going to do this and learn from our mistakes, but either way we're going to do this' speech. Eventually he came around. So, we started measuring and determining exactly what we wanted. While the kids were at school on Tuesday, I started with the stud finder and began marking all the studs and drawing level lines for Ricky to put the brackets on the wall.

That night, Ricky and I went to Home Depot and got the brackets for the wall, shelf brackets to go on them, and one piece of wood to get one shelf done to see if it would even work. I was so pumped to get this project underway that I just went into the paint cabinet in our garage and picked the spray paint that we had the most of. Luckily, it was Flat Black. And I started to get to work:

And so did Ricky:

Seven brackets later, we got our first shelf up!

The more we thought about it, we really didn't like the fact that the shelf was made of two boards put together. We weren't convinced of the stability, so Wednesday, we made a second trip to Home Depot and got 4 boards cut to the full length of the shelf. Again, I painted them black and we got them hung up.

The next day, I headed out to Home Depot at the beach to get some more brackets, since we had purchased all the ones that the store in town carried. I also got 4 more boards to finish up the last rows. Unfortunately, they came up 5 shelf brackets short, so we weren't able to put up the bottom row, but it still looks pretty darn awesome.

Not too bad for our first project, eh?

-Britney Marie