New Shelves for the Coffee Bar

It has taken a lot of tweaking, but I think the Coffee Bar is finally complete.  We made the shelves this week and I think we found the balance it needed.

Here is the original Coffee Bar.  I found this butcher block cart at a yardsale and had picked up the crate (on the wall) at an antique store.  It started out cute and uncluttered.  

Next, I found the 3-tiered tray (on clearance) at TJMaxx and it added some needed storage, but as you can see, things were a little tight.  Another problem was the open shelves on the bottom.  With 2 woolie huskies, this was not a practical storage solution (we had to wash everything stored here every time we used it).

This buffet was found at a Thrift Store.  We painted it and removed the top drawers and it began its life in our home as a tv stand (the top drawers held the DVD player and Cable box. 

 Next it was moved into our hall and used as an entry table and we added the baskets.  

When my husband gifted me with a gorgeous pine buffet for the entry, I almost sold this before realizing it was a perfect fit for the coffee bar. 

Still, it felt very cluttered.

I had been wanting to replace the crate with shelves for awhile, but we had a lot of other projects going on.  

Then we cleaned out the garage and I spotted this old board from the attic.  

My husband had removed a bunch of old boards from the attic floor of our 180 year old house. It is about 2" thick and 12" wide, and looked to be in very bad shape.  I thought it was perfect for the shelves I wanted.  

I asked my husband if we could rip it down the middle to create two 6" shelves.  So that is what we did.  We were able to make the shelves the perfect length by cutting off the yucky end of the board.

Once the boards were sanded and finished with Danish oil, they looked like this:

The wood was gorgeous under all those layers of yuck.

Shelf brackets are pretty expensive (and kind of fancy) and I wanted something really plain.  My husband found these at Home Depot and they are not actually shelf brackets.  He thinks they are called angle irons and were in the hardware section.  They only came in grey so we spray painted them.  They were under $3 each and are very heavy duty.  The hooks are from Walmart ($3.98 for 20) because Home Depot only had shiny gold ones.

Of course, before we hung those shelves we had some work to do after removing the crate from the wall.  So I spackled and painted the wall in my favorite color - Simply White.  It is a creamy white that works with everything.

And the finished shelves!

If you are ever in New Hampshire, come over for coffee!