Mud Room Shelves – A Pinterest Challenge

We finally completed our mudroom shelves! This room actually serves as both a laundry room and a mudroom and after organizing the laundry side a few months ago, I was anxious to tackle the gardening shelves on the mudroom side.

Uh-em…”anxious” here being a relative term since it was a few months ago. But (hopefully) you know what I mean: they bugged me every time I walked by and I would think, “we really need to finish those shelves.”

These were the inspiration pictures from my “For The Cottage” board on Pinterest that I pinned ages ago:

These were very similar to shelves I’ve seen in Ballard catalogs as well (in fact, isn’t that second photo actually from Ballard’s?). I was specifically looking for shelves with wide front molding that would help to hide a long shop light under the bottom shelf that I use to start seeds for my garden.

I love how the shelves turned out, but what I love more is that we were able to build them with mostly scrap wood we had leftover from other projects.

The four brackets were on our front porch when we moved in, but when we expanded it, we didn’t have enough for all the new posts so we decided to leave them off rather than having new ones made. The are perfectly chunky and beefy- just the type I would’ve looked for anyway!

The shelves themselves are made from fir tongue-and-groove flooring that we originally used for the wood counters in this space (see the full shot above for a peek at the counter), held together by glue, the brackets and small pieces of plywood at the centers.

No close-up of those plywood pieces: imagine rough edges, lots of screws and everything doused with paint to hide it. The “DIY cottage look” to us embraces imperfections…and using what you have.

The front molding is made from two pieces. The widest molding is from our house remodeling – it’s actually our baseboards, attached upside down. We had to purchase the narrow molding along the top of the wide molding, as well one long, wide pine board that serves as the backing to the top shelf.

That wood, plus a few screws, were the only things we had to buy to complete our mudroom shelves.

Knowing we can build things like this that serve a function, are beautiful, and sized to fit our space inexpensively by using things we’ve saved is one of the reasons it’s so hard to get rid of things when we’re done with a project.

Though I do wonder: since we actually use things from our pile of scrap wood, why doesn’t it seem to get smaller? Probably due to the fact that there’s always another project we’re working on as perennial DIY-er’s.

The cycle never ends…

-Jami

Linking up with Young House Love:

And also Frugal Fridayat Shabby Nest.

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