Shelf Building Extravaganza, Day 1

I've been talking about Shelf Building Extravaganza for at least a month and now it is finally time to do it. Shelf Building Extravaganza is building sets of shelving for six different areas in our house. My thought was, why not do all six sets at once? The theory is the same, so once we do one set, we can apply the knowledge to the other five. So it begins.

This was my basic inspiration. This is one of the two existing shelves that came with the house. Basically, there is a back brace, and two side braces and the shelf is plopped down on top. First came the planning.
I measured all the areas I wanted to put shelves in and then drew in a rough sketch of what it would look like with the shelves. Each set got a different sheet of paper. This one is the dining nook plans.
I then re-measured everything and printed some one-inch graph paper. (I love the Internet. I didn't have to go to the store and buy some graph paper, I just googeled it and printed.) Then I made a final plan. To the right of the drawing, I listed the total number of lumber needed for each part--shelf, back, sides. To the left I listed all the supplies I needed for this particular set of shelves. This one has a long list because I plan to put a grow light in so that took a lot of extra supplies.
I also sketched out how the shelves would be cut out of the particle board so I would know how much particle board to buy.
I transferred all my left hand lists to a single sheet of paper
And then transferred those numbers to an excel spreadsheet.
I then put all my plans in a notebook and walked over to our local Lowes (where we had gift cards) and spent an hour and a half locating all the things on my list. This was a great idea. I will always do this for projects from now on. It is so much less stressful to just wander the aisles with a notebook, rather than trying to make decisions when you have a full cart of lumber. Plus, I went home and slept on it and realized I had forgotten things.

I came home and added a column with the aisle numbers, and a column for the prices. I then got a rough total of what things would cost.
And that pretty much took about eight hours of the first day.