Shelved

I like to study my scriptures in our great room. It's just a nice, pretty, quiet place for that. But, unfortunately, it didn't have a place for me to store my scriptures between times. So I just stacked them up neatly under the coffee table. And that was fine until everyone else decided to do the same. You can only fit so many sets of scriptures underneath a forty-inch round table. Pretty soon they were overflowing all over the room. This would never do. I needed a small bookshelf.

Well, lucky me! (I guess. Is it lucky that I got a shelf from Mom's house because she died? Let's not handle that sword...)

I brought home a little bookshelf that's been in our house forever. In fact, I'm told it's a shelf that Dad made, which makes it even better. When I said that I needed a shelf to put our scriptures on, Heidi felt that a shelf made by Dad would be perfect. And she's right, I think.

Anyway, it had a lot of scratches and dings in it, so of course I decided to refinish it. And, of course, I forgot the "before" pictures. But here's the whole progression of work:

At this point I realized I hadn't taken a "before" picture.
So I've already sanded quite a bit of it down to the
bare pine. But you can still see what color it was.

I removed the back before I started sanding it down. Then I spent a lot of time sanding, to get rid of as many scratches as I could. When I started, I was thinking the shelf had been stained, and even as I got down to obviously bare pine it didn't occur to me that it had actually been painted. But for it to come that clean, it had to have been paint.

Sanding the underside. Dad did a lot of tricky piecing to make the rounded base of this shelf.

Sanded to bare wood. It has a very defined grain.

Once it was all sanded, it was ready to be stained! I wanted to do it the color of my kitchen table, but I grabbed the wrong can of stain. It was walnut. Hm.

I was instantly unhappy.
Bruce and my boys liked it, but I had wanted it
to be more like it was originally—not this zebra/tiger-stripey thing. Some parts of the wood grain absorb stain better than others; I should have realized it
would turn out like this.

So then it sat out in my patio while I brooded over what to do. Finally I went and bought a stain that has better coverage. Another light sanding, another brushing of stain, and here's what I got:

Ahhh. Much Better!
(This color is close, but the camera
didn't get it exactly right.)

Now for the back. I knew I wanted to do something fancy, so I decided to cover it with lace or some kind of fabric.

Here's the inside-back.

Here it is again, and the fabric I chose.

And here it is with the fabric glued to it.

Fortunately, when I was nailing the back in place again I was able to use the very same nail-holes that Dad had made long, long ago. (This is fortunate because I am terrible at driving a nail straight into where I want it.)

Even pounding the nails into the exact same places, there was still one that I couldn't get in straight.
I figure the shelf will be able to live with that.

Here it is, all put together:

Awww. It's so pretty!

And here it is in its new home, in the corner of the great room:

Scriptures and gospel-study books in place.
The "Flight into Egypt" figure that Melanie and I bought for Mom (and that Melanie graciously let me keep) stands on top. 

I'm very happy with it!