I’ve been looking for a new pair of nightstands for a while now, but nobody seems to make anything narrower than about 20 inches. That’s way too big – I want something no wider than 12 inches. I’ve been using a pair of skinny wooden shelves as a temporary fix, but they’re too tall and not well configured for their job.

Weeks of Craigslist searches turned up nothing. I started thinking creatively. A floating shelf, maybe? No, they’re all too shallow. A pair of cheap picture frames at Value Village suggested a pair of tabletops, but they didn’t seem sturdy enough. Then I saw a Craigslist entry for a dining room table leaf. No table, just the leaf: the finish looked good and the width was perfect. Aha! I’ll make my own floating shelf.

The finish turned out to be much less nice in person, but no matter; I sanded it off, sawed the leaf in half, made a pair of supports out of hemlock 1x2s, glued the pieces together, and slathered everything in nice dark stain. The shelves are sitting on my back porch now, awaiting polyurethane. Once that’s done, I’ll bolt the brackets to the walls on either side of my headboard, and I’ll have a pair of floating tables.

In other home improvement news, I’ve finished painting my bedroom walls red. It’s glorious and cheery. I still need to fix up the trim, but the place has a really nice warm cozy feeling now. I will still upgrade the lighting eventually but I’m happy to be very near a point where I can feel like I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.