Our first DIY!

 I love DIY blogs. Well, I love/hate them. I get frustrated sometimes because they say, "Look at this gorgeous and super awesome and expensive-looking thing I built out of wood that only cost me $30!" And I get all excited and think, "$30?! I can do $30 for something so super awesome and expensive-looking!" But then as I read the instructions it's like, "Oh yeah, well I had this $50 piece of wood just sitting around taking up space in my garage, and I had wood glue, nails, a drill, a jigsaw, a table saw, a sander, 16 gallons of paint in an array of colors, caulk, these 10 sparkly embellishments that all coordinate perfectly, all just sitting in my garage so I just bought a 2x4 for $2 and then SPLURGED on cute fabric and the whole thing only costs $30 to make! DIYing is AWESOME!" Well DIY-Blogland, your $30 projects cost me more like $150. And that afternoon you spend takes me more like a week. Or two. But that might be more of a motivation problem so I only have myself to blame for that. But despite my occasional frustration, I still love to see what people create. Out of the stuff in their garage. Because their garage is basically Home Depot.

Well all those blogs had made me really want to put some shelves in our downstairs half-bath. It's quite small and I really hate the way it feels--all cramped and useless. It has no storage since it has a pedestal sink so some shelves would really help out. Here's a before picture:

It's a sad little bathroom. 

 Well we've been putting it off because my garage is definitely NOT Home Depot and we had none of the things that it would take to make shelves. Not even nails. Or screws. Or a drill. This is our first home, cut us some slack ok?! Black Friday came around and we got a pretty good deal on a drill and impact driver (a deal that didn't involve me waking up early, hooray!), so we finally started our shelves. Here's a mid-way picture:

 And a few weeks later (yes...sigh...it took a few weeks) they are mostly done!

I say mostly because we ended up caulking the shelves. That little nook isn't square, but we had the wood cut at home depot (they won't cut angles) and we got it home and it wasn't a perfect fit. So we tried to fill in the gaps with caulk and I did a seriously terrible job. You can't tell in this picture but it is everywhere. It was harder to do than I thought and I had a difficult time getting it smooth. So some day, when I decide to care again, I will have to go through and repaint the blue paint and try to cover up the caulk mess. But for now I'm just very excited because I think Gavin did a great job building them. It really transformed the bathroom. Now for the fun part of buying baskets and accessories!