$100 Room Challenge: Repurposing Shelves

Okay so here is the plan for week 2 of the $100 Room Challenge: Repurposing Shelves.

Hi everyone, welcome to week 2 of my $100 Room Challenge: Repurposing Shelves project. If this is your first time viewing the $100 Room Challenge let me take the time to give you some background. This is a bi-annual challenge sponsored by my friend Erin, over at Lemons, Lavender, & Laundry. What is the $100 Room Challenge is all about? The challenge takes place twice a year, January and September, and Erin invites us to redo a room in our home using a budget of only $100. As you can see the premise of this challenge is real simple: one month, one space, and $100. If you want to know more about the $100 Room Challenge, check out Erin’s post to see how the concept was inspired, and it’s colossal growth since she decided to start it!

Weeks at a Glance:

WEEK  1      WEEK 2     WEEK 3     WEEK 4  REVEAL

THE GARAGE BEFORE:

This season we are excited to be cleaning up and organizing that overlooked, hard working area of our garage. I think the entire pandemic is what really spurred this upgrade and transformation to become a priority for us since we have been leaving a pile of shoes next to the door along with a few non essential groceries, etc.

Plus for sometime I a have really wanted to cover up these unsightly oil stains and tire marks from our older vehicles. Along with removing some of the unused junk that seems to accumulate in a space like this. Also our stand up freezer quit working in February, yes just before the pandemic, perfect timing right? So it needed to go as well. I called to have a local company haul it off, which cleared up a ton of wall space for our $100 Room Challenge: Repurposing Shelves.As you can see on our proposed vision board, I have the standard vinyl closet shelves pictured. The trick on this is that we are repurposing existing closet shelves we took out from various closets inside our home that we upgraded.

Here is our stash of shelves we removed from our Farmhouse Pantry Upgrade a few years ago, where we installed thick cut cedar shelves. While I had no intentions of putting these wire shelves back into the pantry ever, I knew they would come in handy for spaces like our garage or garden shed, where I don’t really want to put a lot of money into basic shelving. “Waste not, want not”, is something my grandma always said from growing up in the great depression.

You may notice that we kept all the pieces: the support brackets, wall brackets and side mounts as well.  Not only did a clean demo save us some time on the installation of our pantry project, now we have extra resources to utilize in another project. This is a designer tip I would like to point out, while demo can be a lot of of fun, sometimes you need to really access what you are demolishing prior to doing so, not everything should go into a dumpster. In that same vein I should also say I am not a hoarder either, not everything is salvageable, you have to be able to access and assign “value” and “functionality”. To install the repurposed shelves all we needed was to purchase was additional wall screws and anchors for this type shelving which is available at your local big box hardware store of choice in the closet organization sections. They run around $2-5 a set, for a real budget saving tip take the pre-package sets over to the hardware section and size them out for a value package for an even lower price, that is what we we did.  As for the organization of the shelves, we wanted to put things not utilized as often up higher, like our larger coolers, seasonal pool noodles, and go bags. If you are not familiar with a an emergency go bag, these are a really cool idea that my sister gave our entire family one year for Christmas, she is the perfect planner. They are a pre-packed emergency bags in case of a home emergency, fire, tornado, flood, hurricane. They contain all the things you would need to survive for a few days. I guess they could double as camping gear as well, if you think about it. We also made sure to keep things we use regularly down on lower shelves, like the patio cushions. While we could keep them on the sundeck all season, I find between the sun and rain it really ruins the cushions fairly quickly here in Georgia.  Because of this, I prefer to store them when they are not in use. This just keeps them nice, bug free and not faded.We also added a ride center for our helmets, and boots for when we ride our motorcycle. I am not sure that many of our readers know that my husband and I ride, since it has been a few years since we have been on the circuit. Honestly we really need to give our girl a little maintenance and service and take her out soon, it really is the perfect social distancing activity. We have just been having so much fun doing all our DIY’s lately to hit the open road.
This is the final look at how our  $100 Room Challenge: Repurposing Shelves, turned out this week and we really only spent under $5 because of prior proper planning and using materials we already had on hand. Now this space is more organized and has a cleaner look than a bunch of stuff piled up along the wall.

Budget:

Week 2:  Shelves: Free -purchased additional screws & anchors: $4.78

The Proposed Schedule: 

Week 1: The Plan

Week 2: Clean, Get Old Freezer Removed, Repurpose Wire Closet Shelves, Organize Junk  Stuff

Week 3: Paint Concrete Floor

Week 4: Build Shoe Bench, Add Beadboard Drop Zone, Paint

Week 5: REVEAL

I hope you have enjoyed this weeks upgrade for the $100 Room Challenge: Repurposing Shelves, and check out my friends below: