The One Where I Fall in Love with Wood Filler, Part I

I've recently been binge watching Friends on Netflix. It's perfectly acceptable in my mind to admit to this since Netflix made all 10 seasons of them available as of Jan. 1, 2015.

If you haven't started watching them yet then you need to stop whatever you're doing and go do that now. Except finish reading this first and THEN switch over and start watching them.

Or if you're like the people in my family, hook up multiple computer screens and then you can do both at the same time!

.....Right?

Anywho, this is the one where I fall in love with wood filler.

I mean REALLY fall in love with wood filler. I didn't even know this stuff existed until I was directed to it by the fiancee.

The saga of the dining room bookshelves has been going on for several months now.


When I first bought my house I had dreams of large bookshelves lining the wall.

Realizing, at the time, that I might be single for a while (obviously God had other plans) I decided that my first project would be building bookshelves in the previous living room.

I also decided that I wanted my living room to be attached to the kitchen so I swapped the living room and dining room from what the previous owners had set up.

Okay, I told a white lie, the first project I did was paint the walls not built the bookshelves. Here are those pictures:

Anyway, here is what the bookshelf looked like as of several weeks ago.

If there's one thing that anyone knows about me, its that I hate math. I loathe numbers with every fiber of my being. My brain doesn't work that way. I've struggled with numbers my entire life.

With that being said, if I was able to figure out the lengths and widths and everything else involved in building bookshelves than anyone can. 

As with most people on the internet, I love browsing Pinterest. And, as I've stated before, I'm the person that actually builds the things that I pin. During one of those browsing & pinning events I ran across this website by Ana White that has hundreds of plans for any project you could imagine. 

I took the plans for the media tower and modified them to fit my wall and look like built-ins with as little cutting as possible. 

This basically called for eight foot high boards and three foot long shelves with 12" width. The middle shelves are about a foot and a half long each. Please ignore my irregularities/crookedness of some of my shelves. 

This unit is actually four separate bookshelves that I attached to the wall with L-shaped brackets on the bottom, middle, and top. I then took trim that was 3" wide and attached it to the front to make the shelves look uniform. 

For the smaller shelves I chose two inch trim and the fiancee attached them with the help of the nieces and nephews. 

I played puzzles with this little man while the trim was being finished...

And then I fell in love with wood filler.

My Loves all together...

Seriously, this stuff is amazing! Elmers has a version that goes on as the color purple and then changes to the color white so you know when its done. I pretty much fell madly in love with it and decided that EVERYTHING needed to be filled with wood filler. 

Seriously...E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G. got wood filler. Every nook and cranny on my bookshelf was splattered with wood filler.

The only downside to doing this was that I then had to sand all of those parts...not as much fun as it sounds.

Stay tuned for Part II of the bookcase saga which is slowly coming to a close (as in, I'm in the painting stage).