Built-ins:

Our built-in bookshelves are finally done and I'm so excited to get to finally share them with you.

This past fall, we reached out to a local cabinet maker about some built-in bookshelves for our living room. After a few discussions, we reached a deal where we got our built-ins in exchange for Andrew building them a new website. 

So, around Christmas, our built-ins were installed and things went from looking like this:

to this:

Instead of hiring someone to paint them for us, we decided to do it ourselves. So we pocketed the $500 we would have shelled out to a painter and got to it. It took us a while to get things painted because we pretty much only got to work on them during the weekend evenings. So, on a typical Saturday night, you could find us looking like this (the headlamps really help painting in the dark, fyi):

We had a really great system going: put on the 90s jams, get into some gross painting clothes, and split up. Andrew tackled the doors and shelves on the ground while I got started on the actual cabinet. 

Pretty soon, things started looking like this:

And then, once the doors were finally finished, we put them on, loaded it up and officially declared the bookshelves done!

So good, right? I am beyond excited to finally have them finished. I can't stop looking at them. I creep into the living room at night and just stare at them in the dark. They have increased the amount of storage in our house by about 100%. There's plenty of room for all my books (and then some) and the cabinets are perfect for housing all the stuff that we want to keep out of the way. 

So, that's the story of of how we got our built-ins on the super cheap -- just a website and the cost of a few gallons of paint (which were on sale, coincidentally). I have a very special shelving system for my books that I'll explain later. It requires a whole separate post. Look for that later this week. And in the meantime, feel free to continue lusting over those beautiful built-ins.