Happy Holidays, Everyone!! Troy and I stayed in Charlotte for Thanksgiving, and were joined by my Dad, who helped us move some of the remaining (read: big/heavy) furniture from our old house. We have made SO much progress on house projects since last Wednesday, but my big DIY for the weekend was to create a fabric storage wall unit.
My "office" is pretty multi-functional, in that it also serves as a craft room, a studio, a nap room, and a guest room (designated nap spaces are pretty imperative on my list of "must-haves"). Anyway, the floor plan of this room is more restrictive than rooms I've had in the past, which has cut down on the amount of furniture that really works in the space (previously, I have used a re-purposed media cabinet for all my folded/organized fabric and a trunk for all my scraps and leftover batting). I decided that the media cabinet had to go, and so looked for other options.
Conceptually, I really dug these
framed shelves by Shanty 2 Chic, but I needed something on a slightly larger scale. Enter the Habitat For Humanity Restore, which had this giant frame on sale ($79.99 at Hobby Lobby, originally $35 at Habitat, I got it for $17.60... Win). It's hard to tell from the photo and the awesome lighting in my garage, but the frame is in pretty rough shape. I don't feel all that guilty about painting it.
To handle the actual fabric storage, I wanted a box behind the frame with four or five shelves. The frame fits a 30" x 40" piece of glass, so I went to the Home Depot and got 1" x 5" (which is actually .75" x 4.5") boards cut to size. Each shelf is 30.5" long, and the two side pieces are 41.5" long.
Step one was to create the frame, which I did using interior construction screws (this is a very, very sturdy unit) because that was what I had on hand. Next I played around with the number of shelves that I actually wanted, and opted for four. In retrospect, if I had considered fabric colors more carefully, I might have gone for five, but oh well. At the point when the decision was being made, it was being made in a pretty arbitrary manner. I attached shelves starting in the middle, and then going to either side.
Much of the furniture and stuff in my office is white, and I didn't feel like the frame would go especially well as it was, so I took the opportunity to paint both the shelves and the frame, using some leftover white satin paint. Conceivably, spray paint would have been the faster/better option, but a few coats of the interior paint covered pretty well, so it worked out.
To attach the frame to the shelves, the tutorial cited above suggests using a nail gun. We don't have one, and given the weight of the much larger frame, I wanted something a little more secure seeming. I also didn't want to risk damaging the frame, since it seems to have a thin, brittle layer of plaster (or something) on it. I opted to use four corner braces, located at what seemed like strategic places (two on the bottom, one on each side, near the top) that could screw in to both the shelving unit and the back of the frame. Once the frame was screwed on, I attached two
D-Ring Hangers to get the unit wall-ready.
And here it is on the wall!
As you may notice, one of the shelves is a little crooked. That could have been due to slightly warped wood, operator error in the use of high tech tools like a tape measure, or any number of other reasons. My bet is on operator error. I considered taking the shelf down and fixing it, but I decided to first put some fabric on the shelves and see if it was something that I really noticed (or cared about). Spoiler alert: I didn't. Here's my awesome new fabric storage shelf!
Look at all that space for new fabric! I found that once there was fabric on the shelves, especially with some hanging over a little, I really didn't notice the crooked shelf very much. So excited to have another project checked off, and to have such a pretty and functional fabric space.
How do you organize your fabric? I'd love to hear anything that people are doing with scraps, since the trunk o' fabric has some serious flaws (I don't know what I have, so I buy more fabric... not that that's always a bad thing!)
