Not-quite built in bookshelves

Books. I have too many of them, even though I make frequent trips to Half Price Books to recycle those destined to be read only once. I’m still left with a lot of books, and as with everything, if I’m going to keep them in the house, they need to be handy and accessible and organized in a soothing way!

When we moved into our new house, we had a picture window and a new set of drapes just begging for two bookcases to flank the window. Here’s a picture of my fiance sitting in the living room reviewing some paperwork. This is the prior owner's furniture. The window in need of some bookcase friends is in the background. Nice, but lonely.

Once we moved our things in, we had two bookcases that had been in my possession for a few years. I really liked the look of them - the color, the trim – but they were short and fat. I had to double shelve my books as well as stack them flat in order to make the best use of the space. Not accessible at all. And the books stacked up always looked so MESSY to me! And to make matters worse, the placement and height of the drapes just accentuated how short the bookcases were…

Ikea to the rescue! Even though Ikea furniture sometimes has funky measurement issues since it’s a Swedish company, apparently an 8 foot ceiling height is standard, so we were able to get the perfect height bookcases. The 16 inch wide Billy bookcases fit perfectly on either side of the window. Well, almost perfectly – we did have to trim about 1 inch off the window sill on the right side. The Billy bookcases are wonderful for books – only 11 inches deep, so they have a nice small footprint for those not wanting our books double shelved.

The bookcases are six feet, 7 inches tall. We added the Billy extenders to get another 13.75 inches of height.

Since the bookcases are so tall, it’s best to attach them to the wall. The bookcases come with an ‘L’ bracket to make that easy to do. We sacrificed some of our precious bookshelf real estate to shed some light in that part of the room, using the Grono table lamp. Love that lamp! It’s a glowing box of light! The height extenders for the Billy bookcase attach in the front, so it’s possible to slip the cord through the back. Even though these lights have an on/off switch on the cord, we were lucky and already had a nearby outlet wired to a switch on the wall, so these turn on with a flick of the switch.

The final addition was a few packages of extra bookshelves. I have a lot of paperback books, and wanted to maximize the height of these bookshelves as much as possible.

Here’s the end product! The spacing for us was perfect With widths available in 16 and 32 inches, and the extenders, these bookshelves can be adapted for many spaces for a built in look.



Total project cost:
Two Billy bookcases $140
2 Billy height extenders $40
3 Extra shelves $22.50
2 Lamps $0 (already had them)
2 Old bookcases sold via craigslist ($40.00)
Total cost $162.50

Tools required – none are absolutely required, but a rubber mallet and a cordless drill made the project go faster. I also used plastic drywall screw anchors that we had in our toolbox to attach the bookcases to the wall. One per bookcase.

Total time – it took about 30 minutes to assemble each bookcase (1 hour total) and about an hour to drag them around - oh so carefully, by myself on the hardwood floors! - and arrange them, get the drapery rods perfect, etc.

Worst Part of the project – dragging the boxes inside – they are heavy (around 50 pounds) and long. Hard to carry around!

Best part of the project – being able to find a book immediately, rather than having to pull out all the double shelved books to find the book I’m looking for!