Another project complete!

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As promised, I'm sharing with you another project that we worked on for about two months or so - our reading area/ bookshelf. Here it is:

We love books. And we have books everywhere. We wanted to have a nice bookshelf for a while but everything I liked was just not in our budget. Plus our house is pretty small, and we don't have an area we could use for a separate library or even a reading nook. So our living room is all-in-one: it's a media room (hence leather couches for all the football watching...note from husband, refer back to this during football season ;), a play room, occasionally, a dining room, and now it's a library too :).

A few months ago (or more like a year) I found this shelf on classifieds for just $10:

It was nice, tall, sturdy and in pretty good condition. But it didn't match anything in our house. For a while it was sitting in the guest room but it was way too big for the tiny space we have there. I knew it was time to transform it and make it more useful.

So I sanded and primed it with water-based primer (I like Zinsser cover stain primer. This stuff is awesome). I then painted it with three coats of Valspar Ultra White. I used a small roller for most of it and an angled brush for the detailed areas. For the inside I decided to go with Valspar Green Mist. I only needed a sample size can. It gives just a little of the color that I wanted.

But after it was all done, it just didn't look finished. So we decided to add some simple molding on the top. We didn't want anything too heavy because we are still planning to add crown molding around this room...You know, one day...:

To seal it, I used Minwax polycrylic protective finish. If you paint something ultra-white or just white, do NOT use polyurethane!! I learned that the hard way :( A very-very painful sand-everything-down-and-repaint kind of hard way...Polycrylic it is!! It's more expensive than polyurethane but you don't need much. I actually was pretty lucky. Usually an 8oz can costs about $9 in Walmart or hardware stores. But I stumbled upon a clearance sale in our local Michaels and bought it for only $4.43. Who would've thought?? I used, maybe, 1/3 of a can but I still bought a couple more cans for other projects we will be working on in the near future.

I wanted this shelf to be mostly for books (it's a BOOK shelf, after all :). And this room already has plenty of color in it, so we went with very simple accessories:

I'll tell you more about all of the accessories (including my $2.50 DIY lampshade) next time but here is another glimpse at my reading "corner":

I think it turned out pretty good for only about $20.

What do you think??

 I shared this project with these awesome parties:

I should be mopping the floor
That DIY Show Off party
Monday Funday  
Marvelous Mondays 
Sumo's Sweet Stuff 
Homemaker on a Dime
By Stephanie Lynn 
Natasha in Oz: Say G'Day Saturday party 
Not Just a Housewife  
Ginger Snap Crafts
Clean and Scentsible
The 36Th Avenue 
The Shabby Nest  
Chick on a Shoestring Budget 
Elizabeth and Co 
Thrifty Decor Chick
House of Hepworths 
Blissful and Domestic