The Craftiest Workshop

Even though decorating styles may change, there are ways to incorporate objects that hold sentimental value into your decorating scheme, whatever it may be.
When I was growing up, in our living room there were these wooden shelves on one wall mounted on a metal strips system with metal brackets.

As you can see, these shelves were used to store lots of things from books, knick knacks, trophies, a stack of local newspapers and photo albums. With no fireplace, stockings were also hung from the bottom shelf at Christmas time. I should note that this is the only picture I had of the shelves and, oddly, also the only picture of my dog and cat from my growing up years lying in close vicinity to each other.

When we were visiting my parents one year with our small children, my mom asked if my husband could remove the shelves. If memory serves me correctly, she wanted to mount a yoke (something sentimental to her) in that spot on the wall. We ended up taking the shelves with us. My husband is a sucker for anything hardwood and these shelves are a gorgeous ribbon mahogany…not something you can buy at Home Depot.

Even now, when visiting my parents, I expect to see those shelves on the wall when I enter the living room; they were such a fixture in our home. It feels so odd to see they are no longer there.

Shortly after taking the shelves my husband made this bandsaw box out of some of the wood.
He also made two smaller ones with only one drawer.

Last week he was working on a sidebar table for our dining area. He used the same idea as he did for the pallet board side tables that he made in the fall. The two outer boards on both shelves are again that same mahogany.

He used all different hardwoods on this table.
Most of the other wood is from pallets he has found over the years.

Having the shelves repurposed into something else that will be in our home is a good way to preserve the memories that I associate with them. There is still a bit of the wood left. I wonder what else will get made with it.