Creating an Ikea built-in Billy bookshelf is something I have wanted to do in this room for years. Matt is an intellectual, has his PhD in Religious Studies, is a teacher, and is completely addicted to books. I really wanted a cleaner look for all of the thousands of books we have spilling all over the place. This summer, I have been on a mission to tackle the things in my home that I dislike and this room was at the top of the list! We sold the trundle bed, added our former master bedroom queen bed, and sold all of the bookshelves. I’ve never been happy with this room, so I’ve just chosen to close the door and ignore it. It serves as our guest room, library, and Matt’s office all in one. (There are no pictures of this step, as I had completely lost my mind by this point.I have a room in our home that I haven’t shared much on the blog. This time, however, since my new trim was deep enough, I could just use some chisels to carve out the corners so the pieces could sit flush between the pine boards and against the face of the shelves. That same "reveal" I wasn't prepared to deal with for the floor moulding was also a factor at the top. Luckily, I bought a large enough sheet of plywood to use for my spacers on the outside wall that I could just use them as trimming for the top! Disaster #4: averted. My tape measure must have been broken on day 1, because the quarter round was nowhere near large enough to cover the gap we had left between the top of the bookshelves and the ceiling. The plan all along was to just use quarter round at the top instead of some elaborate crown moulding or something. We're very close now except for the top trim. We figured out that we would need to lift the bookcases off the floor about 2.5". We needed to make sure that the bookcases were close enough to the ceiling so they could be made to look built in, while keeping them low enough to the floor to make sure that our floor moulding would reach from the floor to the bottom shelf. If you don't want to know about all of our trials and tribulations throughout this process, don't sweat it, skip it! So detailed in fact, that I won't at all mind if you'd like to just scroll though, enjoy the photos (even the ugly, night time process photos), and pretend like you read the whole thing. WARNING: This post is about to get incredibly detailed. I was literally making it up as I went! (And I had a blast doing it.) There are probably better ways to do a lot of these things, but this was as much a learning opportunity and adventure for us as it was a project. We're going to do our best to share our process with you through the photos we have, though the shelves are customized exactly for our space, and are executed using our exact limited resources and tools. In the final days of the project, we were basically working around the clock, nailing in pieces in the dark at 7 AM, and painting and caulking late into the evenings. It was our intention all along to show you exactly how we built in these bookshelves, so you could do the same, but every step of the way was met with unseen challenges, changes to our plan, and last-minute fixes. What we thought would be a fairly straightforward project turned out to be an absolutely massive undertaking.
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