So when we last left off, I had a lot of books, a room identified and had started a plan. You already know that it’s happening but it wasn’t an easy road to get here, and it’s not over yet so let’s start with my constraints and problems so far.
The first one is budget. It’s just not a season for any house projects. I’m sure you’ve been there too and you might be there right now with me. But, I walk a fine line between optimism and delusion and just can’t accept this restraint for very long. I’m really fun to live with. But I’m also passionate that turning your home into something that works for you doesn’t have to break the bank. There are so many ways we can achieve our goals, it just takes extra creativity. So I declared this a $0 project. This isn’t a first. I did this with our guest room years ago and still love the outcome. The rules are simple. I can’t spend any money on this project. I can sell things to make some funds, use gift cards if I have them, shop other areas on our house (or even my mama’s house because she’s the best) but I can’t just go start buying things.
Now, this is a little more challenging that the guest room was because It’s not just making it look better, it’s making it hold an insane amount of books. Shelves are the only real way to do this and if I had extra shelves laying around the house they would be full of my books and we wouldn’t be having this too long conversation.
A $0 budget project always starts with what you have. I had a lot of books, a serious need for a project deep in my bones, several sheets of MDF in the garage left over from past projects and a a few brackets from my mama’s garage makeover. This was enough to start doing the math. I’m not going to bore you with the details here but I measured the walls, the amount of MDF I had and divided it out to see how many shelves I could make out of my scraps.
So far it was enough, but visualizing it is more important so I roughly mapped out the shelves with painters tape on the wall proving it was in fact, not enough. I needed at least 5 shelves for it to be a library and not some shelves thrown up on the wall. Did you know this was a rule? It’s not I just made it up but for standard 8 foot ceilings I’m calling a minimum of five shelves standard. Tell your library building friends.
Pause for more math to see if could fit another shelf and we’re back in business for now. It’s worth noting that at this stage I’m still convincing myself this is going to work, I actually have time to make it work and it’s worth it.
You know how most late 80’s/early 90’s sitcoms always at some point had a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other trying to convince someone to do what was wrong or right? Well, I have two little DIYers on each shoulder. One is telling me it’s going to be magical, we’ll read in here daily and I’ll have it done before school starts. The other is convincing me it’s going to all fall down if I even make it that far probably taking the sheetrock with it and costing much more that my budget. This one says I should quit before I mess up too much.
We all know which one I listened to but the battled it out for a bot longer and there is always more to the story. We’ll get into the nitty gritty next of how it actually started progressing next time.
