Dining Room: Before and After

I got a pleasant surprise sometime late Saturday in the form of my paycheck arriving two whole days early. As other teachers who get paid once a month know, January is the never-ending month of being broke. So, I had already cancelled plans and decided to have a hermit weekend. Given that I now had funds, what better way to spend my last free weekend for at least a month than improving my space?

Here is my dining room before:

As you can see, my wine glasses are all laid out (quite precariously) on the floor, my cookbooks are in a jumble, and various decorative items are piled on top of one another. It's kind of an awkward space for a bookcase given the way I have my wall clutter arranged. I was getting really tired of looking at it every day.

Here it is after:

I realize that in this second picture you can't see the floor which is a bit disorienting-it looks like the room is upside down. The reason why is that my wine glasses (and green antique fountain glasses-they were my mom's) are now hanging on the underside of my ceiling.

To accomplish this I used some inexpensive T-molding (used for flooring). This particular molding came with its own metal track, screws, and plastic anchors. I went a little overboard on the first one and put a toggle bolt in the middle of the track, too, but it took me over half an hour to install just the one track and toggle bolts require really big holes. I got lazier after that. There's a learning curve installing this stuff, especially on a ceiling, so it took me awhile. Still the results are worth it, and so far it looks pretty sturdy. Cutting the tracks and molding to size were pretty simple with a jigsaw.

I also made six shelves (there was one extra) using plans found here. I changed the sizing a bit, obviously; the horizontal parts of the shelves are 1x6 and each shelf is only 2 feet long. I'm hoping the top three hold; the only wood screws I found were Phillips head, and they all gave out on me before getting completely into the wall stud. They're in, they're just not flush with the wall. But so far, so good!