Sports Ball Shelf

Here is a newly completed project. The main need driving this project was the tangle of sports balls that were seeming to multiply in our garage every time I waded though there. For awhile they all lived happily in a nice, big moving box, where they all fit nicely and got along well. However, as the sports season progressed over the past year, the boys actually wanted to play with them, and kept getting them out. Plus, I do have the eventual goal of parking at least one car in our garage, so the big box, however sufficient, was simply in the way.

In Morgantown I had rigged up a sports ball shelf from some of that coated wire shelving that you buy from Lowe's and customize your closets with. However, on the side of the United States where I currently live, I didn't have any extra shelving lying around. And considering that we're trying to save money where we can, I decided to just use what we had.

What we had were several cheap particleboard bookshelves, unused and unassembled in the garage. However, the problem with these shelves is that if you put balls on them, the balls fall right off onto the ground. Okay, so if you place them really, really carefully they will stay on the shelf. But how many adolescent boys do you know that place balls back on the shelves really, really carefully? And really, now that I think about it, how many adolescent boys do you know that put balls on the shelves at all? Sigh. That thought alone is enough to make me hang my head in despair and give up the project all together.

But I digress. I decided to use the shelves anyway, and decided to look for some way to keep the balls on the shelves. That's why I bought these wood pieces way back at the Habitat for Humanity Restore a few months ago. I'm not sure what they really are made for, but they were the right shape, and were dirt cheap:

Here they are painted white and crushing Nutcracker man just before Christmas:

After I painted them white, I cut them with my handy hacksaw and hot glued them to the front of each shelf.

Finally, I put it all together, and here you have it - the finished project.

Now back to that part about getting the boys to return the balls to the shelves in the first place...

I'm posting this on Furniture Feature Friday on Miss Mustard Seed's Creative Blog (which is a wonderful place, by the way).