Custom Built-In Shelving with Endless Storage

 

When we first moved in our basement was an in home office which was not going to work for our family needs. My husband and I slowly renovated the basement over the first year. It was a lot since neither of us had any experience in remodeling. In one corner of the basement we had visions for a built-in shelving unit since this space would primarily be used by our two young children we would need a place to store toys.

I unfortunately never got a great photo of this corner prior to demo but you can see we had our work cut out for us.

View with the half wall down and you can see the corner better.

After we pulled up the carpet and stripped down the wall as best we could we called in reinforcements. My uncle came over to help us work through a plan for the space. We would also need to even out the base shelf which was positioned on top of the cement block foundation that jetted out into the room.

I don't have many in between progress photos but you can see we added bead board to the back of the shelf. We reused a board from the demo and stained it a dark walnut to act as the base of the built-in shelving unit. My uncle helped build out the shelves with pine wood. 

I painted the entire unit with Sherwin Williams Snowbound White. I made a mistake when painting and forgot to use a primer before painting. This resulted in around five coats of paint. Expensive paint too! Since the wood was untreated it just sucked up every coat I painted. 

Pro Tip: Prime your untreated wood and save time and money!!

We added bead board under the shelves and actually ended up running it around the entire length of basement.

We ended up with an amazing amount of shelf space to display photos and store kids toys. We use this shelf everyday and could not be happier with how it turned out.