The Tree Shelf

The big project for the week was to remove a small, cramped closet from the kids' room, freeing up some valuable floor space. As usual, I completely forgot to take an actual "before" picture, so here's a shot from early in the process: The old closet is gone, the walls and ceilings repaired, but still no flooring.

A few years ago, we painted a tree on the wall over my daughters bed:

To tie in the corners of the room, we built a tree shelf for the newly-liberated corner.
This is the frame and a few slats of wood, the beginnings of the base and the bark of our tree.

Once all the slats are on, we end up with something like this.

A little paint:

And we end up with a finished base:

Base + shelves = the beginnings of a nice little project.

A top was built for our little tree, following the same procedure as the base, then attached and painted. A little detail work later and, Voila! Tree shelf!

A lot of the materials for this project were reclaimed from the torn-down closet. The paint was left over from the previous tree-related project, and the carpet was scrap. I bought a couple of pieces of thin plywood for the bark, but this was still a cheap and relatively easy project that the kids seem to like.