The Stuffed Toy Solution

About a month ago, I approached my husband with a problem - too many stuffed toys, and nowhere to go with them. Bee and I had already sorted out the ones that weren't of particular importance to her, and set them aside to be donated to our bank's holiday toy drive. Those that were left had special significance to Bee, and though she didn't really play with them anymore, she didn't want to part with them either.

In the past, we tried a "pet net" to house the stuffed toys, but I thought it was very unattractive. Also, at that time Bee was younger and still played with all of her "babies," so we had to put the pet net low enough that she could get to them easily. It took up an entire corner of her already small room, and eventually I got annoyed with it and took it down. While I tried to come up with a better solution to the storage problem, Bee was keeping the toys on her bed, but she only has a twin, and they took up all of the available space. At night, she would shove them onto the floor, which seemed to be where they lived most of the time. Vacuuming her room had become quite a challenge.

After studying the layout of Bee's room, I asked my husband if there was any way that we could put a shelf above her double closet. I thought that this would be a good place for a shelf, because the wall isn't very long, and it has a 10-inch jog where our hall closet is located. My husband did some thinking and measuring, and went out to his shop to inventory his supplies and materials. Over the last few weeks, he built this very attractive shelf out of 100% free, recycled materials:


Knowing that we're do-it-yourselfers who are always building or fixing something, my father had given us some discarded wood shelving from a school that he used to work at. My husband cut the shelving to the correct length and width to fit the inset wall above Bee's closets, and sanded it smooth for a nice finish. He cut some pieces from the edge of a wood plank for the bottom rail, to stiffen the shelf, and fashioned angle brackets out of the extra length that had been cut off. The piece that remained looked like a crown to our Princess Bee, so she and Daddy decorated it with materials on hand: rocks, pieces of mulch, beads from a bracelet that Cakes had just broken, clover, and bits of colored coat hangers from the scrap metal pile:


The shelf was assembled using nails, screws and wood glue leftover from other projects, and was given two coats of semi-gloss white paint, which we got for free from the Swap Shop. Thanks to my husband's skills and ingenuity, we were able to turn free, recycled materials into a pretty, functional toy shelf, utilizing space that was previously wasted. Bee was so happy to have a new home for her special friends, that she wrote all about it in her Barbie diary!

God bless my handy (and handsome) husband.