The Thrifty Teen : DIY Room Decor: 2 Nail Polish Shelves

Hiya!

Sorry for taking a few days away, but I've been steadily working on part of my DIY Room Decor project and I have something exciting to share with you!

I have an obsession with nail polish, but for many years I have just kept my beauties shut up inside a little box. OK, it was a pretty cute box, but still, that wasn't an exactly pretty way to store my nail polishes. Now, since I started the DIY Room Decor series, I felt like I didn't need to just store my nail polishes, but I needed to display them. And thus came the idea of nail polish shelves.

Well, I know I didn't invent them. In fact, nearly every single beauty guru has them. But those are the ones that cost £18 from Amazon. I did not have £18 pounds, but I so desperately wanted nail polish shelves. So I scoured Pinterest searching 'DIY nail polish rack'. I found some decent ideas, like use a spice rack or make your own out of planks of wood, but since I didnt have either of these and only £5 in my pocket, I knew I had to be even more creative.

So this is what I came up with:

Yay! My very own nail polish rack. And it all came to the grand total of £0.00. Go me!

So here's how you do it:

What you will need

A cardboard box. Something nice and sturdy that will support the weight of all your nail polishes. It also has to be tall enough to accommodate the heights of the bottles as well as the number of shelves. I used a large Lindt chocolate box.
You also need some scissors- big ones mind you, because cutting cardboard isn't an easy job!
A glue gun. I happened to have one at home but you can get one for like £10 which is pretty worth it as they stick just about anything. If you are attempting this project and don't have a glue gun, either use some specialist craft glue, or go out and buy one. I wouldn't recommend just using a Pritt Stick because it just wont stick. Also, please be careful! When they say Hot Glue Gun, they do mean Hot Glue Gun, which means that they can get up to temperatures of over 200 degrees C, which believe me is hot. I happened to unfortunately burn myself, and it was not pleasant.
Just some pretty coloured paper if you want to jazz up your shelves a bit. I used some left over adhesive from my chest of drawers and it worked pretty well, but you can use whatever takes your fancy!

Ok, so let's get to it.

First off, you're going to need to make some shelves. Luckily for me, my box had a lid , so I used the smaller box for the frame, and the slightly bigger one for the shelves. I cut the edges off of the 'shelf box' , which gave me shelves the perfect width, that didn't jut out at all. Which is fab! I just trimmed the shelves to get them the size I wanted, but be careful not to trim too much, because you want your shelves to fit snugly.
Next I warmed up the hot glue gun. For this project, depending on how big your shelves are, you will probably need one stick of glue. You can purchase the glue at any good craft or DIY store, e.g HobbyCraft, B&Q, Homebase. Be careful to use the stand to prop up the gun, because like I mentioned before, it does get very hot and you don't want to set your house on fire.
After waiting 8-10 minutes, your glue gun will probably be ready. To check if it is, pull the trigger, and if glue comes out it's ready- if it doesn't, wait a few more minutes.
Then start to apply some glue to the shelves and fix them in place where you want them. Apply a bit of pressure so that the two materials really bond together.
Keep adding as many shelves as you need. It should look something like this:
Once you have your frame, you can start to add the coloured paper. You could do this before you glue the shelves, but I did it after to cover up the excess bits of paper. Just measure out the sizes of the boxes, and glue them on.
Now you can mount the shelves! They are finished! You can put all your favourite nail polishes on there, and but don't be limited to just that- display lip balms, jewellery or whatever takes your fancy. Here is my finished product: