My husband is amazing

You guys.  We spent all weekend working on our guest room.  All of the other rooms in our house have a pretty put-together feeling, even if there are projects here and there that would feel fun to do.  But here is how our guest room was looking:

Not that bad, but it's the room in our house that had become a dumping ground for everything we didn't know what to do with.  Marriage and living with Jon has changed my style more than I expected.  I'm actually really into having a restricted color pallet in our home.  Before marriage, I would cram all kinds of pattern and color into one space, which is what this room feels like.  Individually the elements are cute, but this is a LOT going on.  The turquoise, the piles of books, and the art thrown onto the walls all feel hectic (really, we didn't know where to put that art, so I tacked them up on the wall so they wouldn't get damaged sitting on the floor).  So.  The biggest thing to happen in the room was the project you see in the bottom left of that photo - a bookshelf!

First, Jon tracked down a bunch of pallets.  This was a HUGE process.  When he had enough wood to start building, he made a base that looked like this:

Taking apart pallets is a slow, painful process, because the wood is so thin.  It doesn't take much at all for the wood to break into unusable pieces.  So, after a LOT more pulling apart pallets, the bookshelf grew to this:

Then this!

Then, Jon added backing to each of the shelves.  One thing that he really worked hard on, and I think made a HUGE difference in the quality of the shelf when building with pallet wood, was to really take time and layer the wood so there is lots of support.  That is why he planned in so many shelf dividers and you see two layers of pallet wood on each side.  Leave it to my smart engineer husband to figure out how to make a solid bookshelf out of pallet wood : )  Here's what it looked like with the back on it:

Isn't he cute? : )

And oh my word.  This thing was HEAVY!

How cool does that look?!  My favorite part is the backing of the shelf on the left where the boards are diagonal.  Jon did that to use up some of the wide smaller pieces that were broken.

Then, our books got to go from these crazy piles...

To this!

The coolest pallet wood bookshelf in the world.  This room is still a work in progress (the pink spongey walls need to go...those pictures want to become a little gallery wall...we need a bed frame for the day bed...you know) but for now, our books have a very, very cool home, all made out of free wood that Jon rescued.  I'll post a full tour of the room when we find some good oops paint to cover up those pink walls!