me vs. Lowes and Home Depot

I don’t know what possessed me to take on a home project today, but it totally happened. We went to Lowes to look at ceiling fans (the fan in the master bedroom doesn’t work, though the light works) and walked out with three 7’10” boards and 9 brackets to hang in our extra room. The Barry Manilow room, if you’ll recall I posted about several weeks ago, has a wall full of mirrors. In between the mirrors are black tracks for the single track brackets. The mirrors are disturbing, but what is more disturbing is we don’t know what’s behind the mirrors (though I’d venture to guess that it’s drywall, based on the screws I pulled out tonight.)

Well, guess what? It wasn’t so easy to hang the shelves. The brackets wouldn’t fit into the wholes – they were 1 millimeter too big. ONE freaking millimeter!

After 3 trips to Lowe’s (the second and third trips involved returns), I headed over to Home Depot. On my second trip to Home Depot, I returned one set of brackets and picked up a set that would screw into the wall. After about two hours, we finally have two shelves hanging, and although the shelves are two inches longer than the shelf brackets, they’re working for now.

Without further ado, our shelves:

The top shelf is holding nothing but TV on DVD….and most of them are mine. The bottom shelf is movies, and they are in alphabetical order (thanks to my husband. I just wanted to throw them on the shelf and be done.) We have wood for the third shelf, but I need to buy the brackets. CDs will go on a third shelf. I’m afraid we’ll need a fourth for CDs, but we’ll wait and see.

Oh, and a before picture (sorry for the sucky lighting):

Now, if only we could agree on a ceiling fan…..