My Newly Acquired Paradise

Since we moved in last April there is one room we have absolutely NOT TOUCHED. It's been hard because this room is just RIGHT there when you walk in the front door, off to the right. But even before we signed on the dotted lines I knew EXACTLY what i wanted to do with it.

LIBRARY!!!

I have acquired a vast collection of books in the last 7-8 years. And in the old house they were just in piles all over the place -- or in closets -- or in boxes -- some in shelves. Just chaos!! (here in the new house they all live in boxes upon boxes) So when there was an empty and available room i knew i needed it for a library. Now... i didn't want just regular old bookselves, i wanted the ENTIRE WALL to be bookshelves. And i wanted them beautiful. And i wanted them built in. After having a company give me a bid, i realized that they were going to be a pretty penny to build. Soooo to pinterest i went -- hoping to find something cheap and easy me and Brian could do ourselves (never EVER tell my husband i got a professional bid, he'd kill me. Brian thinks he can build or do anything i could possibly need -- and he proves himself right alllllll the time).


I found this idea -- it used some Ikea shelves and crannied them together and looked nice. At about $400.00 i thought that wasn't that bad. 

But after much thought and consideration Brian came up with a brilliant plan... and here's how they turned out.


With about $250 worth of supplies we have an entire wall of built in shelves. But not just shelves, he also made a display center for a photo, artwork, sculpture or whatever.

Because they were so inexpensive and SO PROFESSIONAL LOOKING AND GORGEOUS  i figured i'd pass along the info in case someone else wanted a little mental sancuary from the job, the kids, the animals, you know.. the GRIND.


First things first, take off the trim and cut back the carpet. NOTE: Save the trim, you'll want to put it back on the front of the unit to make it look truly a part of the house.


The shelves are all 12" apart -- 9 ft" tall -- and 12" wide. To make this the most stable and aesteically pleasing we used some corner trim as our shelf stablizers. We used just cheap wood because i wanted to paint them instead of stain them. I am painting them the same high gloss white as the mantle as you can see here and the trim and accents of my whole house. I figured it would look that much more natural if it was all uniform.

After we got it all up (after HOURS of leveling, cutting, leveling, nailing, screwing, and the like) we had to fill in all the holes and gaps to make everything even and smooth. Using the woodfiller/mud Brian slapped it on and smoothed it out...


Then to the primer.... and then paint. Easy peasy.  Took us about a FULL weekend and VOILA!!  We have this.... I still need to get some bookends so that they are not so symetrically placed along the edges.  Any ideas??

It was so much fun going through all my books, seeing what i have in hardcover and paper. My favorites are J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series, Christine Feehan's Dark series Ghostwalker series, and recently i've fallen in love with Gena Showalter's Lord of the Underworld series....