home updates {living room shelves}

I love all the character of our house, but one thing the house didn't have a lot of was built-ins.  I love me some old house built-ins... and maybe there used to be some that got removed during renovations over the years, who knows.

So I was really wanting some shelving in our living room.  I looked at lots of pictures of different types of shelving that Caleb & I could do ourselves for a quick-fix that still looked nice.  One major trend that I did like was the pipe shelving units like this one...

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But honestly that option seemed really permanent, time consuming to construct, and more expensive.  Then I remembered the post from House Tweaking where she talked about her new living room shelves and I decided to go more of the metal track route...

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I didn't get a great "before" picture because I didn't get my camera out until we started working on it. So here is my best before... {with one of the metal tracks already up}

The metal tracks comes in a gray metal, black, & white.  It took me a while to decide between gray and black, but I went with black because I have other black hardware in the room.

Installation of these are super easy and self-explanatory.

The stain I went with is the one on the far left, a Minwax brand - color is Ipswich Pine.  The boards we used are a stain-grade pine boards.  We have yet to secure the boards to the brackets, but we will do that... someday.  I like how they turned out!

Of course Rifle Paper Co. makes its cameo in my post...

 

This is a very easy shelving unit to DIY in one afternoon...we even did another one in my master bathroom!  But now is not the time to show pics of my bathroom. :)