How to use a Ladder as Decor

We are a little ladder obsessed. I'm not sure what it is but we use ladders for everything from reaching high places (duh, that's what ladders are for!) to using them as a stand to photograph recipe creations on. Elsie found this inexpensive ladder at a flea market and wanted to add some simple shelves for holding books or potted plants.The paint color she choose is Golden Avocado (from Valspar). Adding shelves to the ladder was a similar process as this golden side table. Trying to retrofit a ladder for shelves proved to be a little bit more complicated than I anticipated. Here's why.I thought simply adding a few planks of wood the appropriate length would be enough but then I found that the rungs on one side of the ladder were slightly shorter than the other. This caused our shelves to slope downward, so much so that I worried display items might slide if we didn't try to fix the issue.Our quick fix solution was to add a short piece of wood to the edge of the shelf planks to try and give the shelf more height. We used wood glue to secure the pieces together. In the above photo I have the shelf laying upside down while the glue dried. After the shelves were completed we finished painting and put everything together.From this angle you can see how many planks we ended up using for each shelf. The shelves are not perfect but they look great in this display and I love how you can easily remove them to either repaint or use the ladder for it's original purpose. xo. Emma + Elsie