#151- Reinventing the Builtins Part 2

Here's a quick recap from yesterday's post.  Our Family Room has one incredibly long wall of golden wood that must go:

So I took the lead of my favorite inspiration store West Elm and decided to paint the backs of each shelf white to break up all the wood and provide a clean pallet for our display items to stand out against.  But I was too scared to paint the actual cabinets, so I painted a thin hardboard instead and placed this in the back of each shelf.  Once they were in, the gross brass shelf tracking was tormenting me.

I usually try to think these projects through before I start to demolish, but in this case, I just started ripping.  The track came out really easy, and it was incredibly rewarding. I may or may not have pretended to be Superman bending rods of steel. 

I was left with that slightly warn area from underneath the track though, so I dug through a box of cleaning supplies that my father-in-law had brought up from his company, and found the Cory Harmony Detailing Oil.  I rubbed a little on and was amazed how quickly the finish evened out. *

I applied the detailing oil to the top right- see how quickly the dis-colorization disappeared?

Next I had to come up with a solution to put those shelves back up, so I borrowed a pretty handy tool from my friend Builder Chuck. 

It's a template from Rockler that helps you drill perfectly spaced holes for adjustable shelves.  It comes with a couple of different bits that ensure that you only drill through the amount needed for your shelf spoon, and not through the wood.  It was super easy to use, but really time consuming considering that I had 6 shelves, 4 lines of track per shelf, 6 feet of track per line.  If you're doing the quick math (or used a calculator like me), that's 144 feet of hole drilling.  Exhausting.  And in the spirit of keepin it real with you all, here's how my little disaster palace looked while the hole drilling marathon went on.

But eventually I was finished, and here's the final result:

And for those of you that like a good before and after like I do:

Listing Photo, just because I think it's fun to compare.

Inspection Day Photo

Today

What do you think?  Better?  Worse?  Remember- those bad boys are totally removable so I can always take them down.   The debate still rages on about the Television vs. Fireplace vs. Mantel Situation, and to my surprise currently this photo above is swinging me in the direction of keeping the fireplace, removing the mantel and hanging the TV above.  I reserve the right to change my mind though.  Plus, the Hubs still has to weigh in, and he's been annoyingly surprisingly opinionated about home design lately.  So we'll deal with that whole situation another day. 

*Full disclosure, this is a product Father-in-Law's sells, I'm just sharing it with you because it really worked for me.  I was not compensated at all for this mention, unless you count photography and babysitting services.