We’d decided that our downstairs closets were, well, stupid .. as most who own a traditionally styled house do. (who the hell owns that many coats?). So while I planned out some more flexible modular based build outs for those, I took the knotty pine used as shelving, trim and dividers and built them in to some not-really-floating shelf units for our bathrooms which were dreadfully ill ..equipped … thusly.
As is wont in a lot of colonialist revival houses of the 70’s and 80’s, knotty pine was the material for nearly everything. Floors, shelving, doors, trim or cabinets. Thing is that, it wasn’t the warm, hand hewn stuff that was in the Capes and Federals of their day and people had a really hard time making them look that way. Our house even has wide board tongue and groove flooring that the P/O drove masonry spikes through (yes, about three per board/joist intersection… THAT MANY NAILS) just to get a more authentic feel from…. While that’s not been very helpful now that it’s time to refinish the floors, all the other ugly, modern milled pine he used back in the day has attained a history of its own which can show extremely nicely when taken into a new form. To the left, a piece of old, scratched and discolored pine, then lightly sanded with a dark amber/red/brown stain applied.
The scrapped boards were about 5/8″ thick and up to 12″ wide. I took the widest and longest boards and sandwiched them to get as close to the 1-1/2″ thickness needed to use an old hidden bracket construction I’d contrived for another set of bath shelves I’d done many years before:
The construction for these was to be a little lighter fisted than those, however as we needed way more function with these. I used three oak dowels soaked in paraffin roughly 85% of the way down. This way, the shelf slid on to the point that there was about an inch exposed. More on that later.
I worked on matching our flooring and trim work for a while… it also needed to punctuate the 40 years of use these shelves had. The difference in finish to our floors and trim is … well, I mean, THE USE of finish coats at all. Our trim was never finished beyond stain other than where they hit it a second time when they re coated the floors, which was actually the color I was trying to get out of these. These got 5 coats of gel poly on top of that. I figured for where they’ll live, they’ll need it.
Excuse the decor … our bathrooms are incredibly ugly but that’s … a problem for another day. The shelves are super solid and at least took some of that crap off the bathroom sink! They’ll be easy to take down and move as well.
I’m hoping one of these days to do a proper bathroom remodel here. These haven’t seen any love since the 70’s and show it. For now, they work .. and have real nice shelves. What is it they say about a painters house and flaky paint?
Custom Job 