Billy Built-ins: Filling the Shelves

We have a finished product, which includes lots and lots of empty shelves (a homeschool mom’s dream) and happy helpers posing in front of it.  And, a picture of my biggest helper and a photo bomber.

On the far left, we have our board games. Well, most of them anyway. Some of them are still hidden away in a cupboard. In the cute old fashioned trash cans (from IKEA), we have Lego and Wedgits.

Above the computer area, I have teacher supplies, so, I put them up a little higher to discourage the kids. Behind the computer I have a stick on blackboard. I love this. One day, I hope to have blackboard covering the entire area behind the computer, but I’m not sure that will ever actually happen. In the meantime, this will have to do.

Next we have shelves containing part of our collection of fiction. We have stickers on the binding of the fiction books to make it easy for the kids to put them away. The books are sorted by reading/interest level and each shelf has a different color sticker. On the bottom shelf, each of the kids has a magazine holder and a binder. 

On the top shelf on the right, we have oversized books and the books I currently use for teaching.  The shelves beneath that hold various craft supplies, coloring books, activity books and white boards. Apparently, I didn't take a picture of these shelves right after we filled them, because these shelves are definitely showing signs of use, compared to the other photos.

All the cute buckets and containers hold various school supplies, craft supplies, etc. This is the beginning of the non-fiction collection (which continues on beyond the built-ins). Yes, I have them all filed using the Dewey decimal system. I found myself buying books I already had or just not being able to find books I needed. So, years ago, I broke down and spent the time to catalog my books. I’m so glad I did.

One last shot of the awesome lights on top of the shelves. I do keep things on top of the shelves as well. 

And, a picture of the whole shelf setup.

Built-in Billys - Part 1

This post is late in coming and I haven’t had the time to get all the information into one post, so we’ll have to go with installments.

We are blessed with an awesome great room in our home. Our kitchen, dining room and school room are all one big room. I had this huge amount of wall space in the school room. While, it is great for hanging maps and such, I knew it would look so much better and be more useful if we had built in bookshelves.

Quite honestly, it wasn't hard to make it look better. One of our “bookcases” was an old entertainment center with no sides. My husband made it in high school, so we’ve been carrying it around all these years (it’s partner is in my bedroom closet), but we finally gave it up for this project. We put it on the street with a “free” sign and it was gone in an hour. And, junk always ended up all over the hearth. Just being real, here.

I didn’t really have the expertise to start from scratch, but found that there are many blogs and tutorials for built-in Billy bookcases. A couple of the blogs I referred to most often were:

http://www.justagirlblog.com/billy-bookcases-diy/

http://www.ikeahackers.net/2012/01/billy-bookcases-to-built-ins.html

The IKEA hackers page actually has the exact layout that we used for our shelves. I like that the wide bookcases were interspersed with small bookcases to break up the monotony. And, the area for the TV in the blog worked perfectly for our schoolroom computer.

We host a home fellowship every other week, so squeezing in a home renovation in our meeting room was tricky. I purchased the shelves from IKEA, and, when, we had a 3 week break between meetings, I got started! Books went into boxes and the school table went onto the back patio. This is one of those times I’m thankful for beautiful Southern California weather in November.

The first task was to put together the IKEA bookcases. The kids loved helping with this.

Next, we removed the baseboard along the wall we planned to place the shelves.

After they were all put together, we set them against the wall to make sure they would fit. 

In the next post, I’ll get into the details of how we installed the shelves.