Cook book shelves

Now lest you think we've spent the last few weeks

• listlessly draped over sofas
• cooking & eating comfort food
• playing in the snow
• being arty but unproductive

then think again.

Well we have been doing all of the above but in addition we've been finishing off a few of the little jobs and, more importantly, planning the next couple of major projects. This in particular has been very useful as we've been thinking about changing the upstairs layout.

However the next big project is the office, which is giving me a bit of a headache - how do you fit two large desks, lots of storage, three computer screens and a large dog into an average size room and still make it look good? Still pondering.

Source: Houzz.com

I love this arrangement but we just don't have a long enough wall.


Anyway one of the small projects was for the kitchen. Most of my favourite recipes I have stored on my laptop (with umpteen back ups - not that I'm paranoid!) but I still have a small, but beautiful, selection of cookbooks. A lot of them are life stories with recipes in them, like "A table in the Tarn" by Orlando Murrin. I so want to do what he did one day.

Anyway I wanted a few of my favourites within reach but didn't want to take up a lot of wall space with conventional shelves. During our last trip to Ikea we'd found some Ribba picture display shelves which we though would work, so we bought three in beech effect.

Before painting

Now I wanted them to disappear into the wall so needed to paint them. As they are a MDF-y stuff I chose to paint them first with cupboard undercoat. I have to say this wasn't overly successful as they needed three coats, and then three coats of the wall paint.

During painting

But eventually they were done and up on the wall, and I was pretty pleased with the result.

Finished

Until next time




Sharon