Salty

I spent over a week on projects at my niece & nephew's 1920's house on South Hill, and didn't get pictures of most of them. In addition to sanding and two coats of yellow paint on these garage sale finds, I did some work on the floor and the roof, and built a baby gate at the top of the stairs that can be removed later with just two screw holes to repair.

Feeling bad about not have pictures of those projects, I took lots of pictures of the shelf project for my sister-in-law and their new house. These shelves used the same concept as the shelf I built for our communications equipment in the Scamp. Even with this project I didn't start pictures until the shelves were assembled.

Each of the shelves is an empty box with one side missing. The tops and bottoms are made from 1/4 inch Baltic Birch, and the edges are made from Hemlock to match the woodwork in the house.

As is usually the case, the wood takes the stain differently. Three of the shelves got second coat of stain so that they would be closer in color to the two darkest ones that only got one coat.

While I was waiting for the stain to dry, I started putting up the pieces of oak that would provide the anchor points for the shelves.

The shelves got two coats of satin polyurethane finish, and a chance to air out a bit in the garage before we started to mount them.

The moment of truth - the shelves fit the mounts, and the color matched the window frame.

We even got them all lined up with the ends plumb.

All the shelves went up quickly, and

my brother was just as quick to grab a brown marker to apply some camouflage to the screw heads before the inspector arrived.

We figured with the eight shelves, there will be room for about 50% of the salt & pepper shaker collection! I'm sure glad I don't have to dust them!

One more project off the list.

And a last minute picture, all decked out.