When we first started house shopping I knew I wanted a home with bookshelves, Jason wanted a large garage for a 'Man Cave'. Unfortunately we couldn't find a home with either of those requirements. So we compromised an got a large back yard, with a promise to put built in bookshelves at a later date, and I would park my car in the driveway so we have room for a pool table, work out bench, and couch.
As a fellow book lover my book collection is large, not quite "Beauty and the Beast'" caliber, But we all have something we aspire to. For the past three years my book it has grown &, I've stored it in our tiny hallway linen closet. Until one night about 3am the bottom shelf that held my collection of Star Wars and Star Trek novels collapsed from the weight. The Southern Belle fit that followed afterward wasn't pretty. But as the saying goes when one door closes another one opens. This case it was the linen closet. It was time to collect on my bookshelves.
I started searching pinterest for ideas and everyone was doing the Billy Bookshelf From IKEA hack. I loved them all especially the Makeristas version of the hack. Unfortunately the nearest Ikea is 3 hours away and the bookshelves are 100 - 150 each. Your girl has a budget people and that was breaking the bank because I needed three large ones.
So I did the next best thing...Craigslist. It took over a month of searching for bookshelves. And one Friday night I got a notification of a yard sale happening the next day that had two sets of bookshelves made from reclaimed wood. As you can guess I was up the next morning and the first to arrive. At $20 a bookcase it was a total deal for me that I didn't have to haggle. Thirty minutes later two bookshelves were disassembled and loaded into my tiny Honda Civic.
It took me about a day to finally decided where in our house we were going to put the bookshelves. We both decided that the unused dining room would be the perfect spot. We're already planning on turning it into the home office this would be perfect. Below is the original room when we first bought it. The bookshelves would be placed on the farthest wall with the vaulted ceiling.
Dont you just love the peach wall color?
Unfortunately the two bookshelves wasnt enough to cover the whole back wall so we measured that a smaller bookshelf would fill in the gap. I also knew I would eventually want either a slidding ladder or lights on the builtin. With that being said we would have to seriously mount these bad boys to the wall.
Step one: Because we're keeping the baseboards intact we had to put the bookshelfs out a few inches from the wall. It required us to place wood boards along the wall in order for the built ins to fit right and rest.
Second: We assembled the two bookcases from the yardsale and built a smaller one for in the middle. We placed all three on stands so they would still taller instead of on the floor. We also wanted to add molding all along the edges.
Step Three: Trying to find baseboards that match the original in our home was a pain. Thankfully we were able to find some that matched but were a little to big. Jason was skilled enough to cut an inch off the bottom. We also put molding along the sides and middle of each book case. I painted them my favorite shade of white by Behr called "White Glove" seriously guys its the perfect white.
We spent a total of $150 for this project. $40 for the large bookcases. $75 for the tiny bookcase and the rest was spent on moulding. Thankfully we already had a gallon of paint left over from painting our baseboards through out the house.
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