Last February I joined my daughter, Lisa, at the Indianapolis IKEA to help her look at some shelves for her home. She came back to Lafayette with some beautiful blue bookcases, and I came home with some ideas. I had fallen in love with IKEA's Billy shelves.
Currently, my office is a hodge podge of shelves. As my collection grew, I would add in a set of shelves, bought wherever I could find a sturdy set that was not too expensive. But for a long time, I have wanted matching shelves. The Billy shelves would serve that purpose, and they were taller and wider so that I could get more horses onto them.
I thought about buying them for a month, measured my office, and made some floor plans to figure out how many Billies I might need. White shelves would go best with the trim in the room, and I finally decided to take the plunge after doing a lot of measuring and math. Even better, I discovered that the white Billy shelves were on sale and that to deliver the entire set of nine shelves that I needed, IKEA would only charge me $100. I made the purchase.
The shelves arrived Friday afternoon, and since I was at school teaching, Craig accepted the delivery on my behalf.
He even carried them all upstairs and into a spare bedroom for me, then decided to open each box to be sure that the shelves had arrived without damage. Sadly, two sets had cracked boards and will need to be replaced by IKEA.
Saturday morning I got to work on the switch-out. I started in the corner by the door and plan to work my way around the room. I really cannot do more than one shelf at a time because I have to remove the horses and put them somewhere before carrying the old shelves out of the room.
My craft table can just barely hold an entire shelf's herd of horses.
It took me a couple of hours to make the first switch out. (Those are the two carpet herd pieces that were on that shelf and are old favorites of mine.)
I was very pleased with how the shelves looked after I got the models back on them.
Next I tackled this corner, a place where it is clear that I was running out of room and adding shelves willy nilly.
Not only did it take my craft table to handle the numerous models,
but it also took a card table. Everything just barely fit between the two.
I wrangled the old shelves out and down to the spare bedroom. (Using a towel underneath the shelves allowed me to push them through the halls and rooms which have hardwood floors)
Then I put together the next set, got them onto the towel, and pushed them back across the house and into my office. That's another carpet herd member trying out his new abode.
This morning I finished filling that shelf with models and am happy with how it turned out.
Two down, seven to go!
