Elegant and cheap shelves are not easy to find. My first ones as a student were built with wooden planks and red bricks. These shelves followed me during my studies and a bit after… but as you can imagine, the bricks were a bit too heavy to move everywhere!
Now that I wanted to get some nice new but cheap and modulable ones in Maine, I jumped on the occasion when someone was selling fresh cut red pine planks in November 2019 (see the post « Finding a home » ). But all the work was still to be done: sanding, re-sanding, varnishing, re-varnishing, Just to talk about the planks. Apart from that, finding red bricks or other similar stuff to be able to assemble somehow the benches one on top of the other was another story. Not to mention the long wall that should be in the new rented house – which I had not find, yet – , since the red pine beams would have to be cut otherwise…
Well, I was lucky. The wall was there, in the new rented house, just the right length. The only thing that took time to find was the « thing » that would replace the $75 / piece of red bricks that I refused to buy at this price – Maine, the land of granite, is just not the right place to buy bricks made of clay! There were some concrete ones, just not the right taste for me… But when I realized that I could use wooden bricks, I only had to go to the nearest DIY-material shop!
I took several weeks to make it, but I am pretty happy about the result. I put only 2 layers of varnish and I wanted to paint in white the wooden bricks… but this will wait until the next move: guests congratulate me, and filled with books and boxes the shelves have now their entire space in the dining room.
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