Painting Bookcases and Installing Floors (finally) | Spring One Room Challenge | Week Five

Well, we’ve finally made it to week five of the One Room Challenge and let me tell you – I am so excited we’re almost done!

Catch up on our progress: Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Living without any sort of clothes storage totally sucks. My temporary clothes rack technically works, but it’s set up in our guest bedroom so we haven’t been using it much. We’ve really just resorted to the “Piles of Clothing Everywhere” storage method. I’ve actually been putting off doing laundry because I’m not sure where to put it when it’s clean. At least in the laundry hamper the clothes have a home out-of-the-way. Clean socks however, have become a priceless commodity. I might be wearing Chris’ socks right now. Don’t judge me.

So, if you remember from last week we hit a little hiccup when we were sent the wrong type of flooring. While I was anxiously waiting for the floors to arrive I decided to start on my shoe storage project.

Instead of building some between-the-studs shelves as originally planned, I decided to use an old Ikea bookcase to hold my shoes. I emptied an old bookcase from our spare room and set the shelves to the right heights. Most of the shelves will be used for shoes, but I made the middle larger to hold some of my jewelry.

Usually when I’m painting a Billy bookcase (and I’ve maybe painted….15) I take the shelves off and paint them and the units separately like this:

I decided to paint the shelves in place on this unit because a) I was being lazy and b) I’m not likely going to change the height of the shelves in the future.

The first step to painting these bookcases is to wipe it down with a duster or slightly wet cloth to clean the surface. If the item has been in a kitchen and might have some grease or other residue you might want to use a cleaner like TSP.

Before I put on any paint or primer I like to put a quick coat of shellac on. This does an amazing job of preventing any of the original colour from seeping through the paint, especially if there is any red tint at all. What do I mean by that?

Those shelves did not have a shellac base coat and after two coats of primer and five (5!) coats of enamel paint you can still see the red grain and the shelf looks pink. Use shellac. Trust me.

Once the shellac has dried, I use a small foam roller to apply primer. I’m a big fan of Bullseye 1-2-3 primer and use it on everything because, no sanding.

Once the primer is dry it’s time for 2-3 coats of paint. Because I was using white this project took 3 coats. I used some Benjamin Moore Advance paint that was left over from our kitchen renovation, but CIL Smart3 is also a favourite of mine for furniture projects.

I painted the outside and edges of the bookcase with the wall paint I used in the closet to give it the feel of being built into the room (thanks mum – great idea!).

Along with the bookcase I also picked up a Rast dresser from Ikea and have given it a bit of makeover inspired by this project by Summer at Simply Stylings.

Thankfully, the correct floors made it to us on Monday and I was able to get them installed in about three hours (with no splinters thankyouverymuch).

The threshold to the closet was a little tricky. The lock and fold flooring has grooves on both sides so I wasn’t able to easily hook the last piece into both the closet floor and the existing bedroom floor perfectly.

To get this board to fit (without removing and then reinstalling the entire bedroom floor) I carefully cut off the lip on the first bedroom floor board and on the bedroom side of the threshold board so that sides would sit flush.

Because I removed the locking part of the board, I used cotton swabs to apply a small amount of wood glue to join the boards together and, hopefully, keep them in place.

The 22 volumes of Canada and Its Provinces along with some paint cans and the tub of ceiling texture helped weigh down the boards overnight to help the glue set.

Once the floor was all done Chris quickly went through and installed the baseboards and quarter round.

It’s like a real room now! A real empty room, sure – but still a room! While we’re so close to being finished I’m actually on a train heading the Ottawa for the rest of the week so Chris gets to take a little DIY vacation. On Sunday when I’m back we’ll be installing all the closet hardware, moving everything back in and, of course, taking photos for the big reveal next week!

Thanks for following along and don’t forget to check out all the other guest participant projects over at Calling it Home!