One Room Challenge Week 6: Open Shelving

It’s week 5 of the One Room Challenge. As a reminder the One Room Challenge team has extended the event by one more week so the big reveals for all of the guest participants will be next Thursday, November 16th!

If you are new around here, we will be completing our laundry room (which is also our pantry and what we call our “dog room”) for this 6 week challenge. You can catch up on week 1 here, week 2 here, week 3 here, week 4 here, and week 5 here.

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This week we installed the counter and shelf next to the washer and dryer and the crown molding where the washer/dryer cabinet meets the ceiling. We caulked all of the seams along where the counter meets the wall and around the crown molding. These ceilings and walls in our house (specific this laundry room) are not level at all. We found this new to us AMAZING product called backer rod. This isn’t the same brand we used, but it is very, very similar. Backer rod fills joints between the trim and the wall (very useful when you have really large gaps in some areas like we did) so that you don’t use as much caulk and it helps keep the caulk in place as well.

I completely forgot to take pictures while we put it into place because I got too excited using it.

This was after we used the backer rod and caulked over the seam, but before we smoothed the caulk into place. As you can see we still had to use A LOT of caulk in this area… all because the ceiling dips and we could not bend the crown molding around the lowest point in the ceiling (which happened to be in the middle of the front piece of crown molding). Now you can barely even tell there was such a gap. Caulk is also amazing. For reference we used this caulk.

We also installed all of the wooden shelves with brackets (I still call them floating shelves even though they really aren’t “floating”). We added two shelves above the counter next to the washer and dryer for laundry supply storage and we added 3 shelves on the longest wall in the room (with the wallpaper) to serve as our open pantry shelving.

We bought 3 pine common boards that were 8 feet long and cut them down with a circular saw to 24″ for our laundry shelves and 60 inches for our pantry shelves. I then stained the shelves with Minwax Jacobean Stain. I applied the stain with a 3 inch foam craft brush and immediately wiped the stain off with a clean, old rag. The stain took a lot darker to the pine that other pieces I have stained with this shade of stain in the past so they turned out darker than I anticipated, but overall we are happy with them.

To install the shelves we used simple black shelf brackets, using 2 brackets for the shorter 24″ shelves and 3 brackets for the longer 60″ shelves. I can’t wait to get all of these shelves styled pretty, and functional! All of the details are finally coming together!

Below is the list of items we plan to complete in the next week to have everything finalized for the reveal: