That's it for the shelves

At least, I hope that's it for the shelves. I'm tired of fussing with them.

First, I bought six more bricks to make the brick-and-board shelves taller. I got buff-colored bricks to mix in with the red ones, since I wasn't completely happy with the red. But I'm not completely happy with the mixture either. But they'll do, and the shelves are stable, a good height, and will be very useful. They also help hide the Christmas and other decorations in bins under the table. And hey, the mismatched bricks just echo the mismatched wall panels, right?

While I was shopping for bricks (I don't know why I'm not considered a more interesting person, really) I went to get another shelf bracket, one that matches the two I already had up. As predicted, having the third bracket a totally different type--metal instead of wood--has driven me crazy. Maybe that's why, when I couldn't find the bracket at Lowe's, I drove across town to another Lowe's. The second Lowe's had it, thank goodness.

So I stained it yesterday when I got home from work, and I also stained the three smaller brackets in case I want to put up another shelf, which I might but not right away. I made my usual mess.

And this afternoon I took everything off the shelf, unscrewed it from the third bracket, unscrewed the third bracket from the wall, and put a new nail in to hold the new bracket. That didn't take long. Then I found the wood glue and glued the new bracket to the wall. Then I leaned against the new bracket and hummed to myself and stared out at the yard and thought deep thoughts about how I really ought to buy some clamps so I wouldn't have to lean against stuff I'd glued to keep it in contact.

Once I was pretty sure the bracket wasn't going to unstick itself when I let go, I left for a while to do other stuff. I'll talk about the other stuff tomorrow because I'm not done. The bracket seemed to be okay when I checked it later, so I went ahead and put the shelf on. I glued it down, although I have no idea if the glue is going to stick properly because A) no clamps and B) I was bored and didn't stay to hold it in place.

But the shelf looks much better now that all three brackets match. It's not going to hold heavy things or I'd have put up stronger brackets. Mostly it'll hold old bottles and sewing notions, because the table underneath it is my cutting table.