I was this close to just buying regular old black track shelving hardware at Home Depot or wherever for Ari’s room. But at the last minute I looked around online for more exciting options, and I’m really glad I did. This brass is taking the sting out of the copper-hardwared dresser not working out the way I’d planned.

The brass! I love it! So shiny!

The hardware Knape and Vogt. I ordered it online from Hardware World and had an easy, trouble free experience with them. One excellent feature of track shelving is that it’s super cheap; we spent $38 on the hardware and then just used cheap whiteboard for the shelves themselves, so that the whole project came in around $60.

Dave went to Home Depot intending to get another sheet of the same birch plywood that we used for the desk. But then he texted me arguing that the white board would be both considerably cheaper and considerably easier to deal with (since it was already the right width). I’m still not sure we made the right decision. I am a big fan of that birch plywood. The boards we got soaked up the stain in a less pleasing manner. But honestly I’m not sure how noticeable the difference would have been once all the stuff was on the shelves. They also were kind of warped when we first put them on the brackets, but they flattened out nicely after we weighed them down with books and whatnot. So it’s fine. And we can always switch it out later if we want. Oh! I found the stain I couldn’t find back when I was blogging about the desk, and it’s Varathane Kona.

That paint color, by the way, is Benjamin Moore’s Salamander, and I’m still loving it.

So installing the shelves! Was pretty simple, although it made me a little nervous at times. The big thing, of course, is to make sure the tracks are screwed into studs. We have a stud finder, but it was not cooperating, so we had to resort to alternative stud finding methods. After some googling and some trial and error, we located one in the right general area by testing the wall right next to an outlet. This process involved a fair amount of making holes in the wall and then having to patch and paint before we could move on.

We read that studs are usually 16 inches apart and bought the tracks assuming that would be the case in our walls. I couldn’t get any firm information about whether it was okay to skip some studs and just put tracks on every other one, so we did every one to be safe. And now I think it looks cool that way. Because more brass!

But before we started drilling holes with the 16 inch assumption, I got the brilliant idea to go down to the basement, where there are unfinished walls with exposed studs, and measure those. And the studs down there are TWELVE inches apart, it turns out! I was very excited both that I had saved us from drilling in the wrong place and to find out that our house is so much stronger than the average house.

Yeah, so, a few more unnecessary holes later, it became clear that we may have a stronger than average basement, but the rest of the house is very average indeed, with boring old 16″ spaced studs.

Once you stop drilling unnecessary holes in your walls, hanging track shelving is fairly straightforward. Level twice, drill once:

And then all that remains is the decorating. A lot of the stuff that Ari likes best is in Minnesota with him, so the shelves are not necessarily the most current representation of his interests, but that’s what happens when your kid goes to college, I guess. We’re in sort of a tricky period for kid rooms. Right now Milo is sleeping in this room, but Ari will be back again for summer soon, so he’ll be back in here. And then Milo only has one more year at home after this (!). So I guess it’s sort of our general whichever big kid is home from college at the moment room for now and eventually we’ll probably move Abe in here and turn his room into a guest room? I don’t know. It’s really weird to think about how we’ll go from four kids at home to one in the next 3 1/2 years.

So that got a little heavy and made me tear up a bit; let’s leave it with another picture of these brassy shelves:

And this kitty vignette I made:

We’re getting pretty close to finished in this room! Coming in under that critical one year start to finish mark!