Junk into Jewels*

I've been on a Do-It-Yourself kick lately; the biggest project has been giving an old bookshelf a makeover.

This bookshelf hung above my desk in high school, and held my stereo and favorite CDs. I decorated it beautifully with stickers, magazine cut-outs, plastic jewels and stick-on earrings. I know that sounds gorgeous, but then get this - I painted over almost everything with glow-in-the-dark nail polish. I know! How do I not have a show on the Home and Garden channel?


After I moved out, my dad used this shelf for his tools, so it got scuffed up and dirty, but the best part is - he didn't remove the jewels!

Even though I have several buckets of paint dying to be used in a project, I didn't want to do the prep work - scraping off my old decorations, sanding the old paint, and applying a couple of coats of the new colors. Instead, I popped off the dimensional decorations, found an outdated MLA handbook, used an Xacto knife to cut the pages from the binding, and covered the bookcase with those.

I used regular Elmer's glue, and the pages stuck to the painted wood just fine! You can also dilute the glue with some water and coat the finished project to seal it, but I like touching the pages, even if they are a little crinkly. (I did the removable shelf, too, but forgot to put it in for pictures.) A literal bookshelf...

*Ok, so maybe I took the jewels off the junk to make it nice again, but I love the double-word score titles, so I fudged a bit.