DIY Friday {#2} - Hanging Rope Shelves

I recently started my DIY Friday series to try to motivate myself to complete some of the hundreds of projects I have pinned.  My goal is to complete one pinterest project a month and I am happy to report that my first month has been a success.

If you follow me on Instagram you probably saw that I decided to try the hanging rope shelves I had pinned from Casa Cullen. I thought they would be perfect for the space above the toilet in our master bedroom water closet and the nautical vibe from the ropes is the perfect compliment to my beach theme. (I still need to share my finished master bathroom with you guys!)

The complete tutorial is on Casa Cullen's site, so I won't give a detailed how-to, but here's the general idea:  I cut a 1"x10" board to my desired shelf width, then drilled big holes near each corner for the rope to go through.  Then I lightly sanded, primed and painted the shelves.  I mounted a regular old hook to the wall with small plastic anchors.  Then I threaded the manila rope through the holes in my shelves, hung it on the hook, and messed with the height/angle of the shelves until it looked just right.  I cut down a hardwood floor tongue piece that we had left over from the study to slide through the rope below the top shelf to hold it in place.  I just tied knots below the bottom shelf, trimmed the excess and then frayed the edges.  I recommend making sure you are happy with how your shelves are hanging before you trim your excess rope though as it is would be very difficult to re-tie your knot with not enough rope to work with.   

The only things I needed to buy were the wood and rope, so this project only cost me about $20!

Linking up here:

One Project Closer

House of Rose

Designing Dining and Diapers

The Idea Room
SITS Girls
Upcycled Treasures

Powder Room Shelves

Finally have some new blog material!  Our weekends have been super-busy so I've been slacking on the projects lately.  This weekend I finally installed the shelves for the powder room that I've been working on for a while.  I love the look of open shelving and the small Courtland powder room is the perfect spot for them. 

I used a 6 foot long piece of 1"x12" pine, cut in half for two shelves.  We choose pine because we wanted a rustic/distressed look.  I stained it with Miniwax Special Walnut and I tried a trick I read online of soaking steel wool in the stain for a few days to give it a gray-ish tint.  I'm not sure if it worked, but I really like how the color turned out.  I gave the shelves two coats of stain and three coats of satin finish polyurethane.

Here's how they turned out:

 

For the brackets I just spray painted plain whites ones from Home Depot with oil rubbed bronze spray paint.  The wood and bracket colors match some of the pieces in our family room... I love it when I can use something easy like this to tie the rooms together.

There are still a few more things I want to do in the powder room.  Here's the updated list:

Paint
Shelves
Bead board or board and batten trim
Make/buy some art for the wall above the towel bar (I'm excited about an idea I have for this!)
Crown molding

Anyone have any suggestions on whether I should do bead board or board and batten?  I'm leaning towards bead board, just because it's easier, but I can't decide.

DIY Spice Rack

Another small house project has been completed!  At my old house I had a shallow, stud-deep cabinet that I used as a spice rack.  Unfortunately I never took a picture of it, but it was something like this:

It was so nice having all of my spices lined up so I never had to dig in cabinets to search for something.  I used to use the lazy-susan method, but it never failed that the spice I was looking for wound up being at the very center and by the time I got to it I had knocked over six other things in the process.

I wanted something similar to my old built-in rack, but there's not really a good spot in my new kitchen for a built-in cabinet and I didn't want to sacrifice any of my regular cabinet space, so we decided to build little shelves for the side walls of the pantry. 

Pay no attention to my messy pantry.

 

My dad built the shelves in a matter of an hour or two.  All you need are a few pieces of 1 x 4 wood, a saw, some screws and a screwdriver, a bracket or two and some paint if you want them painted.  In all it cost about $20 to make two sets of shelves (one for each side of the pantry).  We did six shelves of varying height on each set.  If you had some scrap wood laying around, you could conceivably do this for free!  

Pre-installation.

Dad hanging my spice shelves!

I can't wait to fill them!  (The paint was not quite dry so I have to wait a little).