ORC Weeks 4 & 5: A trio of arches and a window box

A few weeks ago I sent out a newsletter that I’d be participating in the One Room Challenge as we makeover our daughters’ playroom, and it’s still happening! If you’re interested, you can catch up on Week 2 and 3 here.

I had to skip last week’s post, but I’m back to share what we’ve tackled in the meantime, mostly on the weekends and at night after our girls’ bedtime. It took us nearly an entire weekend to build the bookshelves arches just the way we wanted them. Remember we’ve inherited open white bookshelves and we want to make them work smarter for storage and look more stylish. By adding a series of three arches, we think they’ll look more custom, conceal the messy top shelf, and just feel more intentional. Our biggest issue: working around the fact that they weren’t spaced evenly when they were built. UGH.

At first, we built brackets and supports and left most of the top shelf exposed. But I felt like it looked way too dinky (see below).

Womp, womp. Time to get back to the drawing board. This time we decided to use the pencil + string trick to draw a semi-circle in the middle of our plywood, and then use a jigsaw to cut out the arches. I love that they leave a peek-a-boo opening on the top shelf, and feel substantial. And while the second set of shelves is slightly less wide than the ones closest to the wall, you can’t tell because we made the strip of wood where the arches meet slightly wider when needed. The differences are so subtle that only we can tell.

In order to create three arches and a sense of symmetry, we built out a 6th, far right shelf using plywood. As you can imagine, this all requires tons of measuring and cutting and nailing and securing. It’s tedious but worth doing the right way so we don’t have to correct mistakes later. We only want to build this once! Can you see how it will come together between the arches in place, the wallpaper (check out that back wall) and the marigold yellow trim? I’m so excited!

We’ve also started building the flower box, which involves measuring and cutting and gluing. I’m loving it so far! [SNEAK PEEK BELOW]