Clearly, we have pleased the shelving gods

I'm not sure exactly what we did - it certainly wasn't dusting our current shelves. Whatever it was, I am pleased as punch that one of our house dilemmas has been solved in a bizarrely fortuitous way. To back up, one of the many (many) things we're really excited about is having recessed shelving in the living room to house a bunch of media stuff - mainly, the mini-computer and projector that we use instead of a TV, and a receiver for the speaker system. Mounting the projector at the top of this shelving unit will get it up high enough that we won't be projecting silhouettes of people, wagging dog tails, etc., like we have been for the past five years (woohoo!). It will also provide some storage for part of Brandon's record collection.

Anyway, the idea for this recessed shelving occurred to us after the budget had been drawn up and agreed upon, which meant it was going to have to be completed either (a) as an add-on, or (b) by us. We got an initial add estimate for a *fancy* version... although to be honest, I can't remember what was so super fancy about it except for the price ($1500!). When I squawked about this, we got an estimate for a scaled down version (basically a box made of MDO plywood, trimmed out) which was still $600. Again, this seemed like an awful lot for something I felt like we could tackle ourselves.

One day sitting in the living room at our rental, I happened to be ruminating on this issue, when I looked up... and the clouds parted, and a blinding ray of light came shooting out of the sky! And then an apple fell on my head.

OK, not really. But I did look at this shelf - which was built by Brandon's grandfather - and I thought to myself, "self, that sure looks similarly-sized as the opening where the built-in shelves are supposed to go for the media cabinet." Low and behold, we measured the shelving unit (20" wide), and went over to the house to measure the opening... 20.5". Seriously.

So today we hauled it over, increased the height of the opening a bit...

...and plopped it right in there!

(...trapping Brandon in the wall in the process.)

Could that possibly be a better fit?? Ridiculous. All we have to do is slap a plywood back on it, paint the inside, and trim it out. Even better, we'd been unsure where this particular piece of furniture was going to fit in the house. Et voila!

(Here is Brandon when I told him to look like a drywall-knife-wielding serial killer.)

Hooray for saving $1500 and repurposing something you already have! Shelving gods, I promise to be better about dusting in the future.

In unrelated news, I checked my Google Analytics account earlier today. One of my favorite things is to see the ways in which people are finding the blog via Google searches. Apparently there's been a burst recently of people searching for "red house brown trim" (and likely getting to the blog via Google Images). The one that made me giggle the most today was "how to build an outdoor turtle house." My friend, I'm sorry you likely did not find what you were looking for... but please send photos of that turtle.