December 11, 2012

Dawn's House: DIY Library Shelving

Hey there! Today I thought I'd share another of my favorite throw back posts from Designing Dawn, this time about how I built my very own DIY library shelving to create the personal home library I'd always wanted. It's one of my favorite projects to date, and was not nearly as intimidating as it might first seem. Read on to find out just how simple it was to make my library dreams come true!

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When we left off in the reading room last time, I had built a wall full of shelves but had yet to finish off the project with sanding, stain, and decor. To recap, that process consisted of buying five 2x12x12 boards from Lowes for around $19 each, having them cut down at the store to 10.5ft to fit our space, and mounting them on the wall (making sure to hit multiple studs) with shelf brackets, which also came from Lowes. Well, I couldn't wait to get this one done and fill up my own library, so I got them sanded with my handy little mouse (affiliate) as soon as possible, and as soon as the weather turned nice enough to give me a chance to open windows for some ventilation, staining commenced!

I used the same Minwax Special Walnut (affiliate) stain as on the shelves above the desk. I still really like the rich, medium-toned color, and love how it brings out the grain of the wood.

The process was pretty straight forward. I stained the top and bottom of each shelf, making sure to wipe any excess stain off the walls and brackets. Then I touched up the wall paint as needed. Once everything was nice and dry, I let the shelves air out for a few days before I started on the fun part— filling them up!

While I'm not 100% happy with the styling yet, and will probably be fiddling with that endlessly for the rest of time... at least all the books and other things are off the dining table and on the shelves where they belong. My plan is to eventually replace most of the nick-nack stuff with my ever-growing book collection, and I almost can't wait to head over to Goodwill to browse around for even more books now that I have the extra room for them!

So all in all, I'm pretty thrilled with this room now. Here is a comparison shot from where we started with this wall of shelves to where we are now:

It's kind of amazing what a difference it made. Having everything up off the floor makes the whole room feel cleaner and more modern, and having shelves all the way to the ceiling makes the space feel bigger too. Love! This is kind of a hard room to photograph, because it's connected to the dining room, and has the office area on one side, so in case you're curious about how the whole space works together with shelves on two different walls, I'll leave you with this panoramic shot Itook with my phone.