Pottery Barn / Goodwill Shelves

Since finding Ana's site, my list to build is 3 million miles long. I know how much things cost to build now, so I refuse to pay for things that are less quality than I could build on my own. Slight problem...I'm an Engineer 50 hours of the week. Time is not my friend.

To help save time on things, when I drop off stuff for donations to Goodwill, I scour to see if there's anything I can just refinish instead of building from scratch.

A few months back I came across two of these shelves.  They're Sophia shelves from Pottery Barn.

For $6.  SOLD!  They needed a little TLC though, so I got to work on refinishing them.  In my head I had a vision of finishing them the same way I did my mail holder, but with the turquoise (that I had left over from my sewing machine makeover) as the underneath layer, and white as the top layer.

First I painted it the turquoise color, and then I topped it with a thin layer of white.  After that all dried, I sanded with my 200 grit sandpaper and was not happy at all with my results.

Not exactly the look I was going for.  It wasn't awful, but it wasn't what I wanted either.  Back to the proverbial drawing board I went.

I decided to mix the turquoise with some of my glaze and a little bit of water and apply it to my shelves.

Too dark!  To lighten it up some, I mixed up some white paint, a little bit of water, and my turoquoise glaze together.

Too light!  Stupid shelves.  From there I started dipping between my turquoise glaze mix and my white/turquoise glaze mix until I came up with something I FINALLY liked.

And because I'm me, and I can't leave well enough alone, I glazed all of the edges.

After I matched that up in the room, I decided I liked the glaze a lot, so I glazed the entire bottom part of the shelves and left the top part with just the whitewash / turquoise color.  I had no idea these shelves would take this long to refinish, but sometimes working with color, and getting the color right is hard.

These shelves went in the someday kids room with the daybeds.  I've actually started calling this room the daybed room instead.  It's the room that my nieces / nephew will stay in when they come to visit, so I loaded the shelves up with things that reminded me of them.  I'm actually missing a picture of one of my nieces...I really need to update my picture selections.  It's on the mile long list.

Here they are on the wall (they're HEAVY!!!).

The tiny little monkey on the left shelf was given to me by one of my nieces as a birthday present.  I've found its perfect home!

I say the word fun a lot.  That little sign is perfect for me!

You know I couldn't leave out a details shot.  I'll end on a few full room shots.

For those of you that want the deets, here they are:
Paint: Behr's Aquatic Blue
Glaze:  Ralph Lauren in Smoke
Any white paint you have laying around.

For the whitewash / glaze mixes, I used twice as much paint as I did water and glaze.  So if I used 4 ounces of paint, I added 2 ounces of water and 2 ounces of glaze.  It all goes really far, so if you try this, don't mix too much!

Next up in this room...replacing the pillows so my living room can have pillows again.  Happy Wednesday!

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I'm linking up to the parties on my sidebar...go see what everyone else is re-crafting!