Kitchen Update: Open Shelving

Despite still having many ticket items on our to-do list to complete, there was one project that I'd been itching to start, and that is the open shelving in our kitchen. If you have been keeping up with the home renovations on here, you may remember my kitchen inspiration post from almost a year ago... and so far, I think I got everything I wanted in my kitchen, but my open shelving had been put on hold for projects with priority. But finally, I was able to convince my husband to get started (I basically brought it up at least once a week for the past 6 months)...

For the shelves themselves, we cut 1" thick redwood boards to about 3' long and James stained them (about 3 coats) of my favorite-right-now stain (Minewax "Provincial", which is like a dark walnut)

Our canvas was the wall to the left of our kitchen sink and we knew that one of the shelves was going to sit just above the tile, which would require drilling into it.

It took us three different specialty drill bits to get the right one that would even think about drilling through the tile and finally when we found the right one, it barely even lasted through the 8 holes that we needed for our shelf supports (I had one frustrated husband, I'll tell ya)

Notice the different outfits... multiple night job...

My only real participation in this project (other than staring as my husband drilled for minutes on end... anticipating a cracked tile... which never did happen!) was putting together the "brackets", I guess you could call them. We used regular old galvanized steel pipe to make the angles... just screwed them together and called it a day, very easy. Once put together, they were very easy to loosen or tighten to adjust for level or placement of he screws/holes.

For the angles we used 1/2" pipe, 2 flanges, an elbow, a 1" nipple and a 4" nipple...

Once the shelves were up, my real job began! 

I am very happy with how everything turned out, the color of the wood, the pipe supports, all of it! And I can't wait to carry on the shelving to underneath our cabinets as well... we aren't far from a completed kitchen now!

One more thing to tag onto this post, I finally painted the interior of our front door. I will try not to relive it, but it wasn't a great experience. I was only practiced at painting our wooden doors with the phony grain and this door was very different. It's a steel door with a totally flat face that probably required some sort of sanding or primer before painting. Long story short, I did no prep and ended up having to do many coats to get the right look. Overall, as long as you don't look too closely, it turned out okay. I do love the color though, I might even be open to a black wall one day!