New home — new furniture! The last few weeks, I spent a few hours here and there on costco.com’s website and Wayfair browsing ideas for furniture pieces. When I was on Wayfair- one piece caught my attention. Something about its curves held elegance for me.
I bookmarked the page to think about the piece — I wasn’t sure I was going to have enough space to be able to display this in its full elegance — but I also wanted to make sure I set aside enough budget for necessary pieces — while I do need a plant shelf- this seemed like a luxury piece to own in my mind.
Pinterest is also another place I spent several hours on — and while browsing pinterest- I came across this piece and showed it to Z.
The youtube video that showed a similar design indicated that it was 2 pieces of hula hoops spray painted rose gold, with 2 wooden rods on the bottom and 2 pieces of wood stained shelving. You would think that the difficult part of this process would be finding the. wood and nails and all the build stuff at home depot. We found all the necessary material in and out of Home Depot/Lowes in less than an hour. You’d think of all the materials to gather — that the easy part would have been to find the hula hoops.. and the difficult part was finding all the wood , nails, paint etc.
We went to Target for what we thought would have been a 15 minute run for hula hoops. Walked to the toy section — I kid you not — I picked up a stack of hula hoops and there wasn’t a single set that matched. Every hoop was a different size. I looked online and Target advertises that the hoops should ONLY come in 3 different sizes: 28", 30", and 34". I can tell you that the stack of hula hoops I picked up came in a million other sizes… and as I picked them up I realized there was no way that the flexibility piece of the hoop would hold the 2 wooden shelves. Just slightly touching them felt like I was bending the shape.
We had to go north of town to pick up something from a friend — so we decided to stay in the area slightly after as they also had a Target there. If I remember correctly — this Target didn’t even have hula hoops. Walmart’s quality was even worse and smaller — and also still no matching set. Then I happened to see a Michaels and thought maybe Michaels would have the flat wreath type wooden material as well — but wasn’t able to find one large enough to hold a reasonable piece of wood. Then I saw TJ Maxx — I poked my head into TJ Maxx to browse different home good items, and walked out, then I saw Aldis and thought to myself hmmm its almost time for Cotton Candy Grape Season! And Z hasn’t tried them yet. And this goes to prove this story (Curious Case) of C’s impression is probably true hehe. Okay — so that day — I went to probably almost every store in that shopping complex but I didn’t buy a single thing — After we had hit Michaels, at that point I think I resigned to the fact that we weren’t going to get the hula hoop that day as it was already 4 PM and probably getting late to start the project anyways so I was just enjoying window shopping and browsing for ideas so I’m a more educated consumer. Came home to look online to see if Amazon might have better options for hula hoops — but there was only 50 hula hoops for $50 ( which quality is unsure) OR the exercise hoops that were weights and looked pretty heavy — which probably would have been very difficult to drill through and also almost always had ridges on the edge.
Z went back to the drawing board and later in the week sent me this sketch proposing a hexagonal shape to match my existing coffee table.
The following weeks we went back to Home Depot and obtained more rods. B/c the wooden boards ended up being recycled from an old project — we were constrained with the length/width of the boards for how wide we wanted to cut the rods. I’ll be honest- I was floored (figuratively and literally) trying to figure out the math on the back of the cardboard we had to spray paint how long we sholud cut each rod to based on the length of the boards ( you can see a glimpse of the math on the cardboard in the background of my TikTok video. Z figured out something and I was like sure as I went to clean up my place some more.
Okies. So heres the final product!
I also created a TikTok Video to compliment this but apparently Medium doesn't take Videos on here… ah well.
I’ll be the first to say as much as I want to take credit for “ building” the shelf — the extent of my “helping” was grabbing videos to document and create my first ever TikTok video , scrubbing on some minor wooden stain paint and holding the board down in half to stabilize it and moral support. Z honestly deserves 99% of the credit! I’m just showcasing his amazing construction capabilities and artistic talent here on my blog and TikTok/social media. Also just letting anyone who is thinking about trying this at home know — Good Hula Hoops are harder to find than specific sized nails!!