Bookcase Project

We're a family of book and movie lovers, so we have often found the need to have several bookcases about the house.  Back in January, we got rid of our old school entertainment center for a refinished buffet and china cabinet from my grandparents' house (see the project here).  This meant that we had three relatively new bookcases just sitting upstairs in our (at the time, unfinished) attic collecting dust.  For reasons that are long and boring but mostly have to do with measurements and new trim around the upstairs windows, all of these bookcases will not work upstairs in the spaces we originally planned.  We couldn't find a place for one of them AT ALL. The bookcases aren't solid furniture, but we did buy them new and had plenty of things to put on them (namely books), so we didn't want to part with them.  We had to figure out something...

...so I decided to take the smallest and use it downstairs in an empty space in the dining room.  We had just moved all the upstairs stuff either onto the basement shelves or back upstairs (or got rid of it), so the dining room suddenly looked huge and bare.  Keeping one bookcase downstairs meant one less piece of furniture to paint, too, so we were both happy about that!  I decided to do a Pinterest project on the bookcase to make it look more meant-to-fit-in downstairs and less cheap-o.  We did have some rougher bookcases that were the same size upstairs originally that we did decide to toss, but for some reason, Kyle really wanted to save the backing.  I'm glad he did, because they came in handy!

Here's the process:

Original bookcase with some decorations/family heirlooms that I felt were my "inspiration"

I went to JoAnn Fabrics and picked out some material that complemented what was already going on in the dining room.  I intend this to be a year-round decoration, so I wanted to be sure the colors matched.  We have a black and gold color palette going on in there with a little bit of green, so this fleur-de-lis pattern is what I decided to go with.  I had Kyle carefully measure the space at the back of each shelf and cut the backing from the shelves we tossed so that they'd just fit in over the back of the bookcase.  We didn't want to take off the original because the small nails holding the backing on are flimsy and this way we can also change out the fabric if we'd like to do so in the future.  I labeled the parts "top", "middle", and "bottom" based on how snug they fit (believe it or not, the shelves were at slightly different heights not visible to the unsuspecting eye).  

All you do after that is cut around the backing, tape, slide them onto the shelf in front of the undamaged backing you saw before and voila!  You have a masterpiece!

Bookcase with fabric backing, undecorated.

If you are doing a similar project but don't have backing like we did, you could use cardboard, particle board, whatever.  You could take off the original backing and cover the entire thing and nail it back on, you could put on a thicker backing with fabric over it, etc.  Instead of using fabric, you could even wallpaper, although we didn't like this idea because (a) fabric was easier, (b) we couldn't find wallpaper in the style we wanted, and (c), the backing is kind of flimsy and the wallpaper probably would have warped it.  Plus, with JoAnn coupons, it made the project even cheaper!

Bookcase decorated!

 We have a lot of family heirlooms around the house.  Probably more than the typical twenty-four-year-old couple does...I had always wished that I had a better way to display them, and finally, the bookcase presented itself!  The two cameras were in my grandmother's family and are pretty old.  The books in the baskets and on the shelves are my grandma's and her siblings school books from the 1920s and 1930s.  The crock is also from the homestead.  The baskets are large egg baskets that I got from my mom (I don't know where she got them) and of course, the pictures, certificate, and brick are from when Kyle and I got married.  The chicken isn't an heirloom...I picked him up at a Goodwill store because I thought he was cute!

The entire look!

The frame on the wall was a wedding gift, the telephone is from my friend Krista's home that she lived in when she was first married (it really worked at her house and I used it to call my mom once when I was babysitting her kids!  Not hooked up in our house, though...just on the wall).  The box beside the bookcase is for holding library books and my teaching bag and is also from my grandma's homeplace.  Finally, the chair is from my dad's side of the family and is super-old as well.

This project was so successful that we decided to do it with the bookcases we took upstairs (instead of painting them).  The bookcases will hold both of our books, but since I promised to leave the decorating up to Kyle, he got to pick the fabric:

Everyone pitched in to help!

Overall, EASY way to spruce up a bookcase!  I have some extra fabric that I used for a classroom project here that I'll probably use to do my school bookcases...someday.

Every day I see my dining room bookcase, I have to smile!  I love that I get to see some more family heirlooms out and looking great, and the bookcase really doesn't take up too much space, so it doesn't feel too cramped.  I HIGHLY recommend using this method to change up a look if you can!