Got Books?

One of the things we discovered we most used at our first house was built-in storage.  The home had 3 decent sized (for a home built in the late 30's) closets, and plenty of wall space for bookshelves, armoires, and dressers.  Over the years we added some built-in bookcases to flank our fireplace and a huge walk in pantry.

{photo by Tina Boaen}

{photo by Tina Boaen}

Those served most of our storage needs.  Until we had a baby, and then a few years later, another.  As we added those babies we shuffled our bedrooms around and lost our extra closet space.  We remodeled an en-suite half bathroom and a closet into a full bathroom so we had a master suite, but then we had to build two small closets out into the room to provide us with the clothes storage we lost when the original closet became a shower.  Therefore the master bedroom became the smallest bedroom in the house, shared by half the people in the house.  We needed more space so we moved to our new house.  Which had PLENTY of closet space.  But no other forms of storage.  We lost our huge pantry and we had nowhere to store all of our books.

{photo by Tina Boaen}

So, as a stopgap measure we bought some wall mounted adjustable track shelving.  Super classy, but it got our stuff out of boxes.  We knew we wanted to add wood floors someday so we wanted to wait until then to do any kind of more permanent built-ins.  The initial plan was to do built in Billy bookcases from Ikea, but as we lived with all the games and other junk on the open shelves I knew I needed some closed storage too.

They didn't look awful in these pictures because these were taken pretty early on.  As we unpacked more and more boxes the shelves became more and more crammed full of stuff.  By the end  there was no more open space between them.  I finally could not take anymore so I found some inspiration on Pinterest and over a weekend my husband and father-in-law managed to get these up.

They are standard, off the shelf wall cabinets from Home Depot, which they built bookcases on top of.  They planked the back for some interest and then I was able to do some purging and editing and have a much more put together looking living room.  I no longer feel overwhelmed by all of the stuff behind me as I sit on the sofa watching TV. 

They still need some trimming out and painting but look 100 times better than the stopgap measure!  And function a million times better too!