Creative Do-It-Yourself Ideas and Inspiration for Your House and Family. Currently making _______________.
Woohoo! My bookshelf dreams are officially actualized. We are so happy with how this whole wall turned out. DIY built-in bookshelves don’t have to be hard. In fact, they went fairly smoothly. If you missed the original build, check out this post first. Then come back here where I have the easy job of showing a bunch of finished after pictures. I got to play with my new camera Joe gifted me for Christmas, so it made photographing these shelves extra fun.
Alright, I must confess: I was 100% all for jumping on the IKEA hack bandwagon for this project. There are so many tutorials about retrofitting the “Billy” cabinet to make floor-to-ceiling bookcases. But when the dimensions didn’t fit our space, we had no choice but to go for a custom solution. And that’s usually where the best ideas are hiding.
You can ask Joe, this was probably the thing I was most excited about when we moved into the house. It was at the top of my list, but not high priority compared to some other projects.
Ideally, we’d love to have an actual mudroom or entryway some day, but for now, we are making do with the space we have. If you know us, you know we I have a lot of shoes. There’s really not a great space in our house for our shoes to live, so we’ve been keeping them in the garage.
Well, we’ve engineered a somewhat functional solution that we hope to keep improving. It’s a big improvement actually. With winter on the way, this will give us a central location for all the snow pants, jackets, hats and everything else. And it’s a step up from keeping them all in bins!
Alright, so we’ve built a door, now what? This project is still on the ground, so what do ya say we get this thing up in the air where it belongs? But, we can’t hang this up quite yet. We added some finishing touches as well as attached the hardware to the door. Start here to get all the step-by-step instructions. And here for the finished product.
Steve and Joe had just finished sawing off the extras where we left off:
Welcome to your new apartment, now may I introduce you to IKEA?
Renting a new apartment can be a lot of fun, and a lot of work. I’m jealous of my friend Maria in that she gets a fresh canvas to decorate. Not jealous of all the packing and unpacking involved. I’m so excited to see her put it all together. Mainly so we can get around to that house-warming party! Here are some of the fun ideas she already has.
…to the movie room! We’ve shown you the awnings and build-out, but where’s the real movie magic? Just kidding, that was pretty magical. Not to mention a lot of work.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Joe loves his LED lights. He is a crusader against all things fluorescent, halogen, or incandescent. He will try to upgrade your home’s lighting if you let him. He’ll do it. For fun. He is so committed to the cause that he mass orders LED lights from China on a regular basis.
