Building a home library

Two book nerds buy a cabin in the woods…

One of the things we discovered very early in our relationship was we both loved reading and had dreams of having home libraries, ever since we were both kids.

It was never about the opulence of those home decor magazine bookshelves staged with vintage books by color. We both wanted a real library, filled with books we would actually read. Yes, we wanted to make it look great, too, but it needed to have….substance.

Luckily, our cabin living room has tall ceilings because it was a later addition to the house. You can see the first phase of our remodel in this post, where we had to figure out how to lay flooring on top of a cement pad.

Anyway, those tall ceilings weren’t really played up by the previous owners and we knew running the closet and shelving all the way up to the ceiling would make the room look even bigger. We realized this place would be the perfect location for our dream library and would even have space for a tall ladder! So, we got to work.

Carrying the weight

In order to carry the load of a boatload of books, we knew we were going to need some bulky, very solid supports. We’d both had our fair share of IKEA sawdust paste shelves and we knew they wouldn’t work here, especially knowing we wanted to add a ladder.

Step one, was to build the supportive side panels. We also had to figure out how to anchor those to our newly-paneled walls. We knew we didn’t want to cover up the beautiful pine walls and we wanted them to look truly built-in rather than like freestanding shelves.

Here’s what we came up with, after taking inspiration from this post by Family Handyman. They have tons of good tutorials and guides on their site and are worth bookmarking.

Media center cabinet

I wanted just a bit of closed storage to shove craft supplies, movies, extra gaming remotes, etc. The Xbox we use to stream TV and game is mounted behind the TV, so this is purely for extra storage.

I like the look of cabinets that sit a bit lower to the ground than standard kitchen cabinets because they look a bit more modern to me. We found that a standard upper cabinet from Home Depot would work great for us, since it didn’t have the toe kick base cabinets have. The cabinet is 54W x 24H x 12D.

We saw a live-edge Saman wood butcher block slab there, too, and grabbed it to become the top of the cabinet. Luckily, we ended up being able to use both pieces of the butcher block by making a bookshelf counter in front of the pass-through window.

Building the shelves

From there, the process was pretty straightforward. We had to cut, prime, and paint the shelves, the front pieces to make the shelves appear thicker, and other molding pieces. We opted for super basic molding to keep the shelves looking modern, so we just cut our own to fit.

Voila - bookshelves!

We used Behr Cracked pepper paint on everything, to match our doors and closet doors. It gives a nice contrast to the wood and pulls our the grey streaks in the knotty pine we got, in my opinion.

Installing the ladder

We purchased a Quiet Glide ladder kit, since it has rave reviews from people and the rail kits were customizable and easy to buy via Amazon, Home Depot, or Lowes. I opted for the maple ladder and we stained it ourselves, since I didn’t want to pay a fortune for walnut and I didn’t like the look of the cheaper cherry (we have no cherry in the house).

We’d already looked at the installation instructions for these online, so we already knew what height the ladder rail needed to be for the kit to work.

The view from the kitchen (through the old front window). That ugly front door gets replaced this summer!

Now the fun part - book hoarding!

We’ve been hitting up used bookstores and thrift stores across the state to find some good reads and old favorites we’ve gotten rid of over the years (moving multiple times).

I’ve also been collecting random oddities from flea markets and antique stores to fill in the gaps. And, of course, finding cool things from Etsy to add character. We both have a couple book nooks (miniature light-up scenes

This is all going to be done over time, we’re not in a rush. So there’s no big reveal of staged shelves at the end of this, I’m sorry to say. But here’s what we’ve pulled together so far.

Last, but most importantly, here’s Thor stealing my reading chair while we were working. Looking like he owns the place (he does).

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Renovating the second story of a 1940s bungalow

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Cabin Living Room Remodel - Phase 1