Built me a shelf and it's ready for hanging.

Have you ever just started something without a real plan? I don’t mean without blueprints, measurements, and cut lists. I mean just an idea and two boards.

Lydia wanted a shelf for her Grandmother Brown’s china. At the old house there was a built in china cabinet in the dining room and she always had them on display. She mentioned that it would be nice to have a shelf along the east dining room wall. We talked about it and it went into the someday pile of projects.

While searching for a piece of cove molding to match the missing piece over the front door I talked about molding with the local Carter Lumber. They didn’t have 3” cove molding but they did have crown molding in 4” wide. Being extremely tired of hunting after the 5^th Big Box store not having any I said, “Okay I’ll take the 4” crown molding.

I picked up enough to replace all the molding on the front of the house so it will match.

When I got home buyers remorse set in and I thought “Why in the world did I buy so much wood?” It wasn’t going to look right. I would have to take all the old off and rip down the new to 3” wide.
Back to the drawing board.

In the mean time the shelf got moved up on the list. While we were on a vacation trip to Saugatuck she pointed out 4 or 5 really ugly shelves and said, “That might work.” A subtle way of nudging my elbow. I can’t stand crap furniture, and I hate to spend money.

That weekend while she was at work I took the unusable crown molding and mitered it, added a piece of ¾ x 6” poplar, some braces, and poof the shelf was done.

Lydia painted the shelf the next weekend and then we spend an afternoon digging through boxes for the dishes.
The shelf just fit in the space between the door frame and the ceiling with enough room for the dishes. I’ll have to dig out the pictures of the finished shelf.

Did I tell you she liked it really well? Yep I’m making another shelf for the opposite wall. Good thing I bought all that extra crown molding.

Dave N.

aka Old Sneelock