A New Library.

SteveAndrea Bourne
by SteveAndrea Bourne
Recently - and partly to give our books a suitable home - we decided to shift around what we do with the rooms in our Georgian Colonial home. Our china collection, which is also huge, couldn't fit in the original 13' by 13' dining room. So, we converted our 19' by 13' family room into the new dining room and moved all the china to the built-ins in there. That left us with an unused dining room. Two words. Perfect. Library. We're half way there and wanted to share the progress.
The plan is built ins. Huge ones. They cover two opposite walls and hold about 2000 books. In the center of the room will be a baby grand piano. We're still arguing about if that makes it a library or a conservatory. What do you think?

We're done with one side of built ins now. The pictures show that we started with mid 80s flowery wall paper and now have a fully internally lit build in book shelf that holds 1100 books. We're just ecstatic about it!

Check out more of our Décor projects here on HomeTalk and on our Blog - TenMinuteSavvy.com
Interior and above-cabinet rope lighting and color really help with making the shelves come to life.
We started with 80's flowery wallpaper.
The plan was really helpful for envisioning the final product.
We tried lots of paint colors.
We ended up with a dark gray/brown above the chair rail, and a lighter tan below. Eventually, we went with all dark above and below. We loved the color!
We fit in 5 30" shelving units, all custom built in our garage workshop.
Adding the face plate and lighting really let us see what the final product would be like.
We went with a bold blue color for the interior of the shelves. We think it looks great as the backdrop for our book collection.
Andrea peruses the book collection.
Next project is to built another wall-to-wall unit on the other side of the room.
SteveAndrea Bourne
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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  • SteveAndrea Bourne SteveAndrea Bourne on Aug 24, 2014
    We finished the library! Here's a shot of the whole room at night and all lit up. That's rope lighting hidden behind the face plates for the book cases. Makes for a great look at night. Sorry about the graininess of the photo. We're working on a better image.
    • See 1 previous
    • SteveAndrea Bourne SteveAndrea Bourne on Aug 25, 2014
      @Miriam I Ok. I just put up the new post with a day time shot of the library. Not sure how to provide a link to it, but if you look under our posts, I assume you'll find it.
  • Kumar Kumar on May 31, 2017

    Great to share the information.

    Thank you for sharing.

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