A girl with a vision. A mom with power tools.

It's a good combination.

It all started out a while ago when Emily decided that she wanted a bookshelf for her room. The three basement bedrooms are small, don't have closets, and all have at least one cement wall - which makes adding shelves more difficult. We've had to get creative with storage down there (remember the beds that we built?), but so far the kids have done well with improvising.

Emily decided that she wanted basically a bigger version of some cubbies that I had made for the girls many years ago. I told her to draw up what she wanted, and we'd figure it out from there. So she came up with this:

She drew it on her iPod. Whatever works, right?

We finally decided to do it yesterday, so we went out to the garage and poked around in the plethora of scrap plywood leftover from other projects. Once we found the wood we were going to use, we got started. She decided to change some of the measurements a bit, but that was the fun part - we created as we went.

She decided that she wanted a back on it, but rather than use plywood, we used a scrap piece of paneling that we found in the garage to give it a different look - and make it not be quite so heavy to move around.

Once we got it assembled, she went to work with the sander.

Then she dug around the cans of paint in the basement until she found the one that she wanted - light colored so that she can doodle on it and decorate it however she wants to.

It actually is square - but the picture
makes it look wonky.

I really can't complain about a kid wanting more room to keep her books - and I'm even more thankful that she was happy to design it and help build it rather than insist on something store bought. We had a fun few hours doing it, she's happy with the final product, and it didn't cost us a penny.

Pretty awesome in my opinion.