Since today is March 2nd – which means it’s Dr. Seuss birthday and National Read Across America Day, I thought I’d make today’s DIY project Seuss/reading themed!

This is a DIY project I’ve been slowly working on for my daughter that I finally completed the other day! While browsing pinterest, looking for ideas for a toddler room  last fall, I saw this pin:

I checked out The Sweet Survival’s tutorial and immediately thought, wow I can totally do that for Sophie! So the next time I was at my fathers house, I asked if we could cut the wood to make it! I intended to do it myself, but his workshop isn’t entirely wheelchair-accessible so he offered to cut it for me.  I knew I wanted to put them between the windows in Sophie’s room, so I gave him the measurements I wanted to make them, and in less than an hour, he emerged with 3 bookshelves made from wood scraps he already had! Since he had a nail gun, he thought it would be easier assembly to do it that way.

So I brought them home and puttied the holes and sat staring at them for days trying to figure out what I wanted to put on them! After painting Sophie’s LÄTT children’s table & chairs from IKEA,  I fell in love with the Urban Pulse color and thought it would be a great color for the shelves…

But once they were painted, I went back to staring mode, trying to figure out exactly how to decorate them. I spent hours on Etsylooking for decal ideas but a lot wouldn’t size properly for a 5×20 shelf front…  and then I saw this Dr. Seuss quote:

I messaged Showcase66  to see if they could resize it for me so I could split it in 2 and put it on the front of the bookshelves – and they said they could!

Applying the decals from Showcase 66

So I continued poking around to see if I could find something else I liked to add a little color, since these were going on the only white wall in her room when I found these chipboards on twopeasinabucket (scrapbooking site)!

I thought they totally looked like fun, so I ordered 3 packs of them and painted them in multiple colors. Then I used wood glue to attach them to the bookshelves, and the shelves were all done!

To hang them, I just used sheet rock screws and drilled a hole through the shelf to hang it right onto the wall! I put the bottom one in my 19-month-old’s reach, but kept the top one a bit higher for now since we are still working through the issue of reading vs. tearing books! But as you can see, she’s very excited to be able to get books by herself now: