gettin' crafty: vinyl guttering book shelves

it finally stopped raining long enough to get my craft on and that blank wall in boy's room is gettin' filled!

i have seen these book shelves made out of vinyl guttering all over the web. they are really cute and a great way to display books for little ones to see and reach.

what you need:

vinyl guttering

the brackets to hang the guttering

and two end caps per piece

(be careful, they come in lefts and rights)

spray paint, the kind for plastic

(if your crazy like me *see below)

wood screws

drill

level

stud finder (you know, for the walls?)

the guttering comes in 10 foot sections. i sweet talked the guy at lowe's into cutting mine into three even pieces. he used a hack saw and it was pretty quick and easy.

i had only seen the shelves made in white and that seems to be the standard color the guttering is sold in, but i didn't let that stop me. boy's needed to be red!

*a word about spray painting:

the plastic spraypaint (*i used krylon) was tomato red not the barn red i wanted.

vinyl guttering is very static-y so it's hard to keep clean while painting.

i ended up using regular spray paint for a third and fourth coat instead of the plastic stuff and that greatly improved the color.

while hanging the shelves i found that the color scrapes off pretty easily so all that hard work will probably be regretted later...

once all the pieces were dry, i marked where i wanted them on the wall, checking that they were level and spaced far enough apart for the bigger books. marked where the studs were and adjusted the mounting brackets to make sure they were spaced to hit said studs. used my honey's electric drill to attach and walla...

i only used two of the shelves because the third would have been too high for boy to reach... maybe i'll hang it when he is older?