Adventures in Shelving: Part 5 of Several

Way back when we'd been wandering around IKEA and I'd been eyeing various shelves, what had initially appealed to me was the black Billy bookcases.  They would be crisp. They would anchor the room. They wouldn't be either white or the shade of IKEA pale wood that everyone my age has far too much of. (She says, sitting in her home office and staring at an entire wall of that shelving.) 

Once we'd settled on the IVAR, I was adamant that we not keep them natural pine. It was too casual for our living room and since we are going to be living with these for a number of years, "aged pine" was right out. We have a significant amount of that already -- see the shelving my yarn stash lives on.  Thus the Philosopher and I watched an extensive amount of YouTube and rummaged through websites and color ideas in order to try and get a sense of what color stain would look best. 

Sampling was delayed by worrying about shelf arrival. If we were going to have to get an entirely different plywood to make shelves -- staining shelves we weren't using didn't seem useful. But once the shelves arrived, the Philosopher set up a station on our back deck and tested our three chosen colors. 

Reader, I didn't like any of them. The top one, Gunstock, was orange. The middle was fine but it was an entirely unexciting brown. And the bottom calls itself cherry and I think it's lying. Cherry should be a dark brown with red undertones. I've owned cherrywood furniture. We looked at them again in the daylight. 

And then we went to HomeDepot. 

Seriously, what is summer, or periodic adventures of the Hedgehog and the Philosopher without a multiple trip run over to HD? Armed a new with water based stain in four colors (the previous three colors are oil), we returned home. 

This picture is from when I got home after this year's white coat ceremony. It meant I hadn't left campus until well after 7 p.m. and while joyous, I'd started teaching that morning at 8 a.m. and was really tired. But coming home, I found three of the four samples waiting for me.*  And they were universally better. I liked all of them. You can see them here on the deck set up next to the oil samples. The middle bar split is because the Philosopher was testing the fancy finish oil he wanted to use. 

We looked at the samples in our actual living room under real daylight and the color Dark Bourbon seemed to be a favorite. Here is the bottom of Test Shelf Number 3, which is entirely  Dark Bourbon so that we could see an entire shelf against the just barely pink of our living room walls. (The wall color, which the Incredibly Patient Mother and I applied last year, is still glorious and absolutely glows in the evening.) 

We appeared to have a winner....possibly... 

*Color 4 of the Water Based Stains is the Varathane Aged Wood Accelerator Stain. It looks really neat but I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like it for the shelving. It hasn't been opened but is on standby for another project of the  Philosopher's.