The Nursery Chapter 9 {a bookshelf}

If you recall from my original nursery post, there is a huge, ugly pipe that stands in the corner of the baby's room. We have several of these in our apartment. They are covered in insulation wrapping and I hate them. When the baby gets bigger I did not want him to be able to touch the pipe, or eat the insulation, so I thought we should design something to cover it.

Now keep in mind, we do not own this apartment. To say that I do things on a budget, especially built-in things that I will not be able to take with us when we move, is an understatement. So for the shelf, I went to Home Depot and had them cut wood to create the frame size I wanted, along with the little leg pieces at the bottom. I tried to be super resourceful and use a piece of left over wood from my office shelves to cover the pipe area on the back side. In my head it would align with the adjacent wall, in real life, not so much. I forgot that nothing is plumb in an old apartment. So here is the boss trying to make my idea work...

And here he is again, taking the back off, because it did not work out. Some people do construction projects in a garage, maybe on a porch. When you live in the city, projects happens right in the middle of your living room.

So we drove back to Home Depot and had a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood cut to fit the back. Problem solved right? Well not exactly, we ran into a couple more issues. Because we were screwing everything into two adjacent walls that were not even close to being a perfect 90 degrees, some of the shelves looked like this.

Also note the pores in the wood (because it was the cheapest). And the worst, the side where the shelf connected to the side wall looked like this.

I know I could have probably mud and sanded the gaps and pores, but keep in mind, I was 8 months pregnant. If I held my hands over my head for more than 60 seconds my heart would race like I just ran a marathon. But I also really like things to look right. A post Jenny wrote about trimming walls with ribbon came to mind as a possible solution, so I decided to give it a try.

I used the same ribbon I used on the curtains, broke out the ole' glue gun, and problem solved. We cut the panel short on the bottom shelf because there is an electrical outlet there and it was easier than trying to mill around it.

The sweet ladies at church threw me a book shower, so I had plenty of fun things to decorate the shelf with.

 So at the end of the day...or several days (this was a longer than intended project)...problem solved!
All for less than $100.

To conclude my nursery series I am going to do a final post with overall photos and enter the room in the Ohdeedoh Smaller Cooler Contest. At 60 sf, I'm pretty sure we qualify. Make sure to stop back by for details on voting!