Finished!

Here's the shoe bench with one coat of paint:

And then two coats of paint:

I added a third coat of paint and then 3 coats of polyurathane to protect it, but forgot to take a picture when I was all done!  And now the bench is under a pile of boxes in the corner of our living room where we're storing everything for the move, so unfortunately I can't take picture of it completely finished.

We decided to make a simple board with a bunch of hooks to go over the bench instead of the hook/shelf system on Ana White's plans.  We thought it would be too top heavy with the shelves and stick too far out in our cramped room.  So this was much easier!  Lots of coats of paint and polyurathane and 7 hooks later it's all done:

We love them!

Shoe Bench Progress

Here are some pictures of the progress I'm making on the shoe bench!

 I used books to hold my shelves in place while I put the screws in.

 

Below is the primed shoe bench looking up from the bottom!

 

 Painting the primer took longer than I expected, and I had a disastrous time trying to clean up!  I wish I'd thought to buy paint thinner before I had everything, including my hands, covered in oil-based primer... but from now on I'm armed with mineral spirits and latex gloves!  I also learned that olive oil and salt will get the primer off your hands but not off your tools!

These supplies are actually clean in the picture above.  I gave up when 99% of the paint was off!

Working on a project...

I haven't posted in so long (I've been sewing some stuff all year but didn't want to take the time to take pictures) but I have a project in the works that I'm excited about!

My husband and I are moving to PA at the end of July.  We've purchased a townhouse that we love, but has a really weird entrance!  The front room is going to be a combination office/entryway and we needed some sort of shoe bench and coat hook system to designate the entry area.  Everything we found online was really expensive, and the things that were less expensive were cheaply made. 

So, I found plans to build an entryway bench on www.Ana-White.com!  It's mostly built right now, I'm just finishing off the shelves - I'll post a picture soon!