Styling the Shelves in the Family Room (with a VIDEO!)

Doesn’t a post just get infinitely more exciting with the word “video” attached to it? Crazy. This is an all-around exciting day, though, because we’re finally getting to the finished product of those shelves we built in the family room. Hooray! If you were with us last week, you saw the breakdown of how we built the shelves. Here’s where we left things:

Nothing like a blank canvas, eh? I had a lot of fun filling these babies and the pictures I’m about to show you are where we ended up, but rest assured- things have been moved, tweaked, and changed since this happened (months ago). The problem was, I could never show you the tweaks because we hadn’t even shown the building of them yet! Thus, another reason this is an exciting day is because I can now keep you up to speed on what makes its way on and off these shelves in a more appropriate time frame. Hoo-rah. 🙂

To start, I really had no idea what I wanted them to look like. All I knew is that I wanted to keep it light and fairly uncluttered. I didn’t want the wall to get too overwhelming. And, if possible, it would be nice if the shelves could all relate to each other in some way, you know, to create some kind of cohesion. Because I didn’t know what to expect, I just went around the house and collected an assortment of things that could work- books, glass jars, frames, candle holders, ceramic or metal figurines, plants, etc.- and lined them up so I could see what I was working with.

From there, it was just trial and error to see what looked good where. Annnnd here’s that video I promised of the process!

And the final product? Sorry, this is lame, but I forgot to take after shots! Thankfully you can get the gist of what it looked like from the end of the video and here is one side that I did manage to snap a picture of.

In general, my goal was to keep things light and airy (not too overwhelming and heavy). I would say I did semi-well with that the first time around. Maybe it was because I was shelf-happy and wanted to put as many things on our new toys as possible, but since then I’ve scaled back a bit. Since I think you deserve to see more of a finished product than just a blurry end-of-video glance, let’s fast forward to see how our shelves have evolved over the last few months. Today, the shelves look more like this:

Not totally different, but not exactly the same. Overall, maybe fewer items- which I think is a good thing in this case. It’s fun to change things in and out- keeps things exciting. 🙂 Overall, we’re really happy with how they turned out- it brings some interest into the room without being just another frame on the wall. AND it’s a place to hang, place, and display stuff… and that’s a win in my book! It seems like it’s been forever since we’ve seen some panned out shots of this room, so let’s get on that too while we’re here.

It’s a far cry from the early days, huh? So.Much.Yellow.

Have a great weekend and we’ll catch ya next week! 🙂