diy vehicle storage

DH has been in cali for work for a few days, so what better time to start a building project than now when he wont get stressed over the clutter?  :)

yesterday i made three storage units to hold and display ozzy's Pixar Cars and Thomas and Friends.  Ozzy has some plastic Trackmaster Thomas and Friends that we house in the family room and store in large bins.  for the most part, they are fine in the bins.  Upstairs in his bedroom, we keep all of his Take Along and Take n'Play Thomas sets and trains, also stored in bins.  these trains are die cast metal.  i noticed that the paint on these have a tendancy to chip off, most likely from getting tossed into the bins every day.

so my DIY project du jour was to create a place to store and display his vehicles so they didnt get damaged and he could easily find the characters he wanted (instead of excavating thru large bins), and show off the vehicles he's collected.

the first one i built was storage for his die cast Thomas trains.  knowing i'd have to keep the units low enough for ozzy to reach things easily, i settled on the wall space under the window of his bedroom.  once i knew how much space i had to work with, we made a quick trip to Home Depot because i wanted to build something sturdy that i could hang on the wall, off the floor.   I found some precut wood strips that were the perfect size for the little trains and bought about $20 worth. 

after sawing off the right sizes (i ♥ power tools!), sanding down the wood to splinter free ultra smoothness, i nailed all the pieces of the frames together and then slid the slats into the frames.  ozzy, mimi and i, put the trains in and ozzy was THRILLED to pieces about it.  he kissed me, and said, "mommy, thank you for the shelf for my trains."  i melted into a puddle of butter. 

then onto storage for his Pixar Cars.  Home Depot didnt have thin wood strips wide enough to hold some of the bigger Pixar vehicles (like Mack, Frank, and Crabby), so it was foam core to the rescue!  (i ♥ foam core!)  so a quick trip to Office Depot and i got started cutting foam core into appropriate sized slats for the shelves.  a bottle of glue and 100 straight pins were used to hold it all together.  i worked on this one thru the evening, finishing it around midnight.  then set all the cars on the shelves and went to bed.  when ozzy came downstairs this morning and saw the display, his response was so sweet, i regretted not thinking ahead to record it.  after an initial, "wow!  mommy!  did you finish cutting and gluing everything?  i see Mack!  and i see Mater!  and there's Jeff Gorvette and Raoul ÇaRoule! Thanks, mommy. It's the best shelf i ever wanted."

he was totally like those homeowners on those HGTV shows when they see the big reveal.  it was awesome.