Filling Up the Shelves

I have not been posting for the last week.  I have been traveling and I am just getting caught up with everything I haven't been doing.  I also found out before I left that I ran out of room for photos.  So I'm rather undecided how I'm going to handle a blog without pictures, but I know I will find some place to put them.  But for now, here are some posts I lined up before I left.

I have built in floating shelves in my living room.  I really did build them myself.  I got all the instructions online in a collaboration between Young House Love and Ana White and you can read that here if you wanted to build your own.  But the point of that is, I needed to fill up my shelves for Halloween. 

So here is the shelf wall in my living room.  They are white on an off white wall.  The wall was not always off white, but this year it is.  The black thing at the bottom is a plant stand.  I don't plan on using it for its intended purpose.  But there is a table in front of hte wall with all my Halloween stuff piled on it.  And the weird cord thing on the right hand side, that's an extension cord.  It's for plugging in the Christmas lights on the ceiling.  I have this big beam across the vaulted ceiling.  So about a year and a half ago I put up Christmas lights and they come in really handy for parties.  It creates a little more mood lighting.  And you really don't see them the rest of the time.  I do need to work on hiding the cord though.

Last year the walls were black.  So I wanted the shelves to stay white for contrast.  But the clean lines don't really work for Halloween so much.  I grabbed one of my creepy cloths that usually goes on my windows and decided that I liked the look.

So I took out 3 of the new creepy cloths that I had bought at Dollar General a couple weeks ago.  I thought I could use half of one at first, but it really wasn't long enough.  So I cut all 3 of them in half and it gave it a bit of a layered look.

All of the stuff that I planned to put on the shelves are pretty much all on that table underneath them.  I started with the top right shelf.  It's the highest and the first one we hung up.  So it's not exactly the strongest.  So I like to keep the least breakable and the lightest things on it in general.  So I basically started playing around with some different combinations of things after that.

So here is the finished product after all my switches and indecision.  I was even smart enough to move the stuff off the table, but didn't really think about trying to move the extension cord.

 This shelf has a spider tea light holder, the orange spider tea light holder from Pier 1, 3 little lanterns that have orange glass and skulls with spiderwebs carved into them, a picture frame with a graveyard picture, a foam pumpkin, and a skull tiki statue.

The very top shelf has a lantern, a Boo wood cutout (it is covered in orange glitter), two foam pumpkins, and a mini skeleton.

The bottom shelf has a candy corn dish from Dollar General (since it's crazed I can't use it to serve food), a little stuffed ghost I've had for years, a little Gargoyle with black sparkly wings, a metal caged pumpkin candle holder, a mosaic pumpkin tea light holder, a black W, and a famed picture of the gates to the Haunted Mansion at Disney World.

I turned the lights out so that I could get all the candles in their glory as well.   I cheat, well I guess not cheat, but I choose to use LED light tea lights.  I buy a ton for Halloween in orange in black, and a ton after Halloween since it's cheaper to replace them then replace the batteries.  But I really haven't had that many stop working.  I just keep adding things.  I choose the LED lights to avoid the risk of fire.  Especially up on shelves with what I'm sure is pretty flammable fabric.

I'm sure there will be a few switcheroos on the shelves, but I think they're staying pretty close to this.