How To Make An In-Wall Bookshelf a-la IKEA

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Big Hole in the Wall		IKEA Bookshelf		Nice In-Wall Bookshelf

Background

When we bought our first house, the basement was "finished". Kind of. For whatever reason, when it was built they never got around to finishing the part around the water main shut-off valve. Instead of using one of those little access panels that mount directly on the Sheetrock, they decided to allow complete access to the valve by installing an accordion door (see picture above, complete with accordion door still in packaging).

After years of looking at that eyesore, we finally decided to fix it. At first, the plan was to install the dang accordion door as someone had originally designed. However, at this point we were starting to get short on storage space and it seemed a shame to lose that extra area that had been framed in for the foundation and water valve. Plus, I loathe accordion doors.

Then we ran into this picture we saw in a kid's decorating book we found on clearance at Barnes & Noble:

"The Kidspace Idea Book" by Wendy Adler Jordan, pg 127

That was the perfect idea for our DVD collection! Now that we have moved away from that house, I guess I better finally finish this post!

Solution

Given my limited carpentry skills, I decided that I didn't want to build the shelves myself. That way, I could leverage off an adjustable shelf system in case we decided to use the shelves for books or something other than DVDs. After determining how much room I had, I settled on the IKEA Billy bookshelf. It was cheap, relatively close to the dimensions I needed, and had all of the adjustability I wanted. However, (and this is a note to self as well), in the end, I think building the shelves myself would have been faster. Had the depth worked out as is, it would have been ideal. However, I had to do a lot of ripping to cut down on the depth of the bookshelf to get it to fit all the way into the wall. Not only that, because of the width of the shelf adjustment holes, I reached a point where I could not make the depth any smaller, so I had to router out channels in the trim to make up the remaining depth. More on that below.

Steps

So, here is the bill of materials that I started with. 

Pic	Qty	Description
	1	IKEA White BILLY Bookcase (WxDxH: ~16"x11"x80")
	2	IKEA White Extra Shelf for BILLY Bookcase
	2	EverTrue Unfinished Whitewood Rosette Block
	2	EverTrue Unfinished Whitewood Plinth Block
	2	EverTrue Raw Whitewood Star Ornament
	1	2-1-2'' Forstner Bit
	2 1 1	Select Pine Softwood Board - 1x4x8' Select Pine Softwood Board - 1x4x4' Select Pine Softwood Board - 1x6x4'
	1	Bosch 1/2-in Carbide Tipped Router Bit

After I bought the bookshelf, I penciled in my design so I would know what I was working towards.

I started by framing in where the bookshelf was going to mount.

Make sure you have plenty of room to access the shut-off valve!

Next I had to assemble the shelf and mount it into the frame I had just roughed for it.

Notice how I had to rip the edges off the front and back of the shelf frame to decrease the depth as much possible. I didn't dare get any closer to the shelf holes for fear they would break. After mounting the shelf, it ended up sticking out of the wall about 5/8", so I decided to find trim that was thick enough to router out channels to cover it up. Also note that I didn't want to take off the nice finish on the front of the shelves, so I only cut the back off the shelves (took the same off the back of the shelves as I did off the back of the frame--that way the holes still line up for the shelves). I was hoping it would look alright to have the shelves stick out a bit farther than the frame.

After securing the shelves, I patched the rest of the hole with Sheetrock and began the tedious task of mudding.

After finishing the sheetrock, I was ready to start with the trim. 

To cover the part of the shelf frame that was sticking out past the surface of the wall, I needed to router a channel 5/8" deep by 3/4" wide on the back of the trim. The router bit I had was only 1/2" wide, so I had to router 2 back-to-back channels, denoted by 1 and 2 below. 3, 4, and 5 marked the decorative grooves that I wanted to router in the front of the trim.

Since I found rosette blocks for the top corners of the shelf, I wanted to match it with rosettes in the plinth blocks at the bottom corners of the shelf. I found perfect matches for the rosettes and the drill size of the hole that the rosettes were recessed in (see parts list above). I thought it looked nice and was worth the effort!

Here is the finished trim around the bookshelf. Notice I had to buy wider trim for the bottom to match the height of the lowest shelf. By the way, I didn't really like how the shelves stuck out so sharply from the trim. So I cut the edges off the shelves at 45 degree angles and it looked much better! See subsequent pictures of the shelves and you'll notice the notches off the corners.

Now I was ready to prime. I think it was more trouble than it was worth, but I bought the kind of primer in aerosol cans. There is not much primer in those cans and that cost a lot more than it should have.

Before I could finish the paint, I had to put up new bead board and trim around the perimeter of the room. Then we were ready to paint!

A bit of paint and voila! Much better than an accordian door!

Perfect size shelves for DVDs and Blu-Rays.

And don't forget the reason for all the commotion. I used some of the wider left-over bottom trim to make the access door to the shut-off valve. It was a bit thick, so I had to have a friend plane it down some, then I did a decorative router around the edge. Much cheaper than cabinet doors. 

Let us know if you have any questions! All-in-all, a fun cabinetry exercise.

Home for the Holidays

The Syracuse house that we were planning on didn't work out. It was a bummer. First, because we had already began building dreams around that house. The girls had already planned out their rooms. I was strategically organizing the kitchen and craft room. Mike was plotting out the garage; Second, because we needed a place to live since Eli, whose house we were living in while we searched for ours, was coming home. He wasn't kicking us out, but we weren't sure how long it would take for us to get into a new place and we didn't want to trespass on a friend's generosity too long.

So we started looking again and we found this place out in West Point. It wasn't finished yet--when we first looked at it the carpet and cabinets weren't in, but we fell in love with it. (Was it a rebound? Probably. But it's a good rebound!)  We negotiated, and got under contract. Our realtor warned us that it might take up to 60 days to get in. So we moved to Mike's parents. They were wonderful. Someday I will be as wonderful as them.

We ended up living with Reid and Shirley for only a couple weeks. They were a couple of educational weeks though, in which we discovered that #1 and #2 were not going to room together. EVER. EVER. AGAIN. Something to do with incessant fighting all hours of the night and pouring water on pillows.  Despite this, and other fun events which may or may not have involved yelling and tempers lost and food everywhere, Reid and Shirley still love us.

Our house finished up fast and we were able to move in the first week in November. We love our new place! It's fantastic. Way better than that Syracuse house. :) And despite originally thinking we didn't know a soul out this way we have since discovered about 15 people that we attend church with that we are either related to (Mike has three cousins and an aunt and uncle out here), or know from high school, college, or other random life events.

We're home.

P.S. Remember those ridiculous nicknames I gave my children. I can't use them. They're too hard to remember. So, while I'm still not going to use names, I'm just going to refer to them as whatever fits the moment. Kind of like Mike with his younger brother Scott, also known as Lance, Nigel, Ryan or Links, etc.

Buying a House is like Dating

I was reading through my old DRAMA!ACTION!DRAMA! journals last Saturday, while I was supposed to be organizing my files and packing to move. It was so hilarious, I trucked it upstairs to read to Mike about when we first met. Keeping a journal is totally worth it, just so you can laugh maniacally at yourself and how wise and wonderful you were in your earlier years.

There was a lot of drama and angst in those journals about my dating years. And I swear selling and buying a house is just like being in the dating world. Except in the dating world, you don't get an agent. (Maybe people should consider getting agents while they date. Just to smooth the whole transaction. That would be a fun job. Or not.)

Here's how our "Dating the House of Our Dreams" is going. When we first started looking around there were tons of possibilities. So many houses to see! So many wonderful qualities in them-- beautiful kitchens, nice bathrooms, craft rooms, landscaped property, ginormous garages. So we had a great time going out.

Then we narrowed it down to what we really wanted in a house. And we started to get anxious. Maybe nothing like that existed! Our ideals were perhaps too high. We expected too much. And we were doomed to live destitute and despairing, in a rental forever. FOREVER.

We'd start to get serious with a house and then we'd find some horrible flaw--like a cramped laundry room, or a cabinet shop with toxic fumes in the backyard, or it was located on a busy road. And we'd start all over again.

Finally after much hand-wringing and over-analyzing (I never did that while dating. Never.), we decided on the house of our dreams (ok. It was the house closest to our dreams we could find. This is unlike how my dating ended. I totally found the man of my dreams.) We were so excited!

And now we're possibly in the heartbreak stage. They might not sell it to us, because it appraised far below its value. (I'm not sure how this particular aspect transfers over in my analogy. Maybe it's like your mom, or your best friend doesn't approve of your choice or something.)

I should probably hold the phone, dial it back a little and just wait. Because maybe it's like the time Mike told me on our second date that I was a "fun girl." (The previous death sentence of many a relationship.) Maybe it will still work out.

Back-to-School Jig

I am almost staggering under the amount of free time around here these days. I get almost two hours a day of quiet time. TWO! HOURS! And did I say "free"? I meant child-free in the sense of "children are sleeping or pretending to sleep in their bedrooms." But let's be clear that these "free" hours are being used productively.  This productivity will probably return to unabashed wastefulness when the new Downton Abbey comes out, but until then I am doing laundry and packing boxes and other productive things.

This summer was an exercise in self-effacement. I am happy to report that it was much better than last summer. Not so much better that I cried heartily when my two oldest returned to school, but better enough that I felt a moment of wistfulness as #1 and #2 headed into the halls of learning. Thought process: "They are growing up?" Thoughtful, sad pause. "They are growing up!" Begin dancing.

Now that summer is over, I want to review what worked for us and what didn't so next summer I'll be crying hysterically when they return to school. (Because our summer together will just be that awesome.)

Our routines this summer were a good way to keep some semblance of normalcy and control and I think they contributed to our overall happiness. We did pretty well at sticking to them until our week-long vaction in mid-july and then we kind of just hung on until school started. Here's is what worked and what didn't work and why or why not.

In review, biking 100 miles did not happen. But we did make it 30! It just got too hot mid-July and we never got back into the swing of it. So maybe next year we'll have to try doing 50 miles all in June.

Also, I feel like it was a good call to only have one major chore and incorporate more cleanliness into our lives with the routines. For instance, having dinner clean-up be part of our routine instead of a "chore" worked well. We still don't always clean up after ourselves, but we're a little better.

The Pass of all Passes was a good thing, we used it almost weekly. We need one of those for activities up North. Honestly, will someone get on that please? The gas was killing me. Our pass is still good for June of next year, so we'll do it through June, but after that I'm not sure. 

Summer School did not occur as regularly as planned. We did make it through Road Dahl's "The BFG" and Betty Brock's "No Flying in the House" and then somehow we devolved into watching movies.  I think we'll have to be better about this next summer. I had the girls do a drawing book report of their favorite part of "The BFG" and put it in a special notebook and planned to do that for our other books, but that just didn't happen. I found a nice website about family theme days and would like to have Thursday Theme Days or something like that next year. I like this everyday theme idea too.

Hiring a babysitter in the mornings to exercise and grocery shop once a week was a fantastic thing I will do until I feel comfortable leaving the chilies to fend for themselves. I'm guessing that's in about two years, when my youngest can get her own cereal in the morning and my oldest is 10. Or maybe when my youngest has learned enough karate to defend herself from the often ill-intentioned advances of her sisters. I guess we'll see.

If I can find enough spare change I think I will hire a babysitter during the day so I can finally write a novel and become a rich and famous writer. :)

So now I've developed a whole new series of routines for school. They seem to be going pretty well so far. More about those some other time. I have to go gargle salt water. I have strep throat and my throat is on fire.

The Wildflower Pedalfest 2013

It wasn't what I was expecting, but it was still fun. On Saturday I rode the 50-mile course. I started out with a friend from Weber State that I ran into at the starting line and ended up riding mostly alone. Which was kind of lame. I definitely want to do it with a friend or group of friends if I do it again.

It was my first organized ride, and I expected large pelotons of competitive cyclists, even though the ride was advertised as non-competitive and not timed. (I know, silly me.) I was hoping to be able to jump in with a group and be able to push 20 mph or above, but the course was more hilly than I expected and the groups of riders were either non-existent or long-gone by the time I started. For a mile I thought I found a group (with capes on too), but they made a wrong turn, despite my yelling, and I never saw them again. I probably should have chosen the 75-mile route, which would have scratched my competitive itch a little more (the hill-climb on that course is the only timed portion of the route), but I'm really not ready for 75 miles.

I liked the course, which climbed to East Canyon and then headed back. I made it to East Canyon (26 miles) in 1:47 (that's minus feed zone stops, with stops it was 1:57) and then because of the awesome downhill, made it to the finish (26 miles) in 1:23 (with one stop figured in, because I reset my computer without looking, whoops). My last 10 miles I was able to average above 19 mph. My overall time, with stops figured in, was 3 hours and 20 minutes. Not what I wanted, but passable.

I got a good training ride out of it, loved catching up with the friends that I ran into (Selsa, Candice, Erica, Charlene), and the dessert bar at the end was to die for! Not literally you people, but metaphorically. Every kind of brownie and cookie imaginable. It was fantastic. Mike and the girls met me at the finish and they helped me sample the desserts and played on the playground and were generally unimpressed with my biking skills and more interested in the desserts. (The girls, not Mike.)

Today I am fighting off the runs and some body soreness (Mike had this earlier this week and it may have started with Ellie on our camping trip), so I think I am more sore than I normally would be.

I'm a little worried for my leg 3 in LOTOJA, but I hope to do well. I just need to get some good climbs in a few more times before we do it.

Earpiercing

On Saturday I took my eight-year-old to get her ears pierced. She had been noticing a couple of her friend's ear piercings for a couple years, and I had told her that if she swam across the pool freestyle she could get it done. After our swim lessons this summer, she's swimming confidently across the pool, breathing and everything.

As we entered the mall, her hand tucked safely into mine, I started to get a little panicky. (The mall and I have a history of mutual hatred, but I watched a guy at Walmart pierce a girl's ears and decided that was definitely not the place to go for ear piercing.) I began to think about my little girl wanting to come to the mall, and dealing with peer pressure, and going through puberty. I almost grabbed her hand and ran out.

"You're too little!" I wanted to shout at her. But I was the one who made the promise and she fulfilled the terms, so I tried to keep smiling as we walked past trendy stores and trendy people.

Suddenly, I felt like I was pushing my child to grow-up too soon. Why had I ever brought up ear piercing? Why was I pushing her into the world of self-decoration so early? Wasn't ear-piercing just another time and money-consuming activity that objectifies women?

"Will it hurt?" She asked me as we passed a cell-phone hawker, stylishly dressed with a Fossil watch and sharp haircut.

I shrugged, "Yes. But not too bad."

She pursed her lips and looked worried, squeezing my hand.

"You don't have to if you don't want to."

"Will you go first?" Her cornflower blue eyes looked up at me widely.

"Watch where you're walking. Yes. I'll go first." I had said that I would re-pierce my grown-in ears when she did hers. I stifled my feminist voice and decided to keep with my re-pierce plan, because I eventually want to cut my hair super short and earrings can soften that a little. And my little girl wasn't pondering the social and political implications of ear piercing. I just needed to relax. It was just for fun, right?

"Is it like a shot? Or a beesting?"

I stopped in front of a shoe store, loudly blaring a song about dancing all night. "Here, let me show you again." I took her earlobe in between my fingers and pinched my nail into it, kind of hard.

She grimaced. "That's not bad."

"Nope."

We entered Claires and watched another girl get her ears pierced and checked out the available earrings. She choose blue flowers and I chose small diamonds. The chatty clerk told us a story about a girl who came in that had lied to her mom about having her ears pierced before. And then, quickly, my ears were pierced again.

I can't decide if I like them or not. I've had my ears pierced before, but let them grow in. It's an easy way to look like a girl without too much effort.

My eight-year-old sat in the chair and tensed her shoulders and closed her eyes. The two clerks closed in on her and on the count of three, she was pierced. She is thrilled at her new earrings and can't wait to get "dangly" ones.

I can't decide how I feel about this "milestone." I didn't consider any of the implications of pushing her to puberty or teaching her about beauty until we were there in the mall. And by then, I felt like I had walked out on the tightrope, and the crowd was already roaring.

This is the problem with my parenting. I don't think things through until it's often too late and then I think, "Wait a minute! This doesn't fit in with my life philosophy. I object!" But I'm already sitting in the chair with an ear-piercing gun to my head. I have thought about tatoos though, and my answer is definitely no. I don't care how many times she swims across the pool.

Thirty 30-Day Challenges!

I am continually questing to "Try a little harder to be a little better." Okay, sometimes I give up and lie on my bed and eat a bag of chocolates and read Mistborn: The Well of Ascension, and I have to trick myself into trying harder. One trick I have been obsessed with lately is the "30-Day Challenge."

My good friend (and sister-in-law, I am so lucky she is both!) Summer, introduced me to them. Her family is always doing little things to improve. They tell each other about, and sometimes join each other in challenges like, "Do 30 push-ups every day," or "Read your scriptures every day," or "Don't yell at your kids."  And they do these for, you guessed it, 30 days.

The 30-Day Challenge has two advantages.
1. Duration. Previously, I would challenge myself to do something with no end date in mind. I would say, "I won't eat chocolate." And then of course in a few days or weeks (or sometimes hours), I would fail and feel like a loser. But 30 days? I can do that.
2. Simplicity. The contest is with yourself.  I used to think I needed to have some sort of competition with points and prizes to be motivated. With the 30-day challenge, I have realized self-improvement can come without the cost of having a loser and a winner. I knew that before, truly, but I have to be reminded sometimes.

Here is my list of Thirty 30-Day Challenges that I am going to undertake over the next year or two. Sometimes I might get brave and run two simultaneously. I will do each of these things daily for 30 days!
1. Take vitamins
2. Don't eat after 9 p.m.
3. Exercise for 30 minutes or more (minus Sundays)
4. Eat only one treat
5. Eat 2 or more vegetables  (yes I know this does not meet the DRA, but baby steps are good)
6. Eat a fruit as part of breakfast
7. Give a hug
8. Read my scriptures
9. Write 200 words
10. Do recommended PT for knee
11. Organize something
12. Don't swear/yell and definitely no Yell Swears.
13. Try something new
14. Do 10 push-ups
15. Go to bed at 10 p.m.
16. Sweep
17. Play the piano
18. Don't eat treats
19. Count my calories
20. Have dinner planned
21. Be on time
22. Compliment someone
23. Do an out-of-ordinary act of service
24. Write in my journal
25. Write a thank-you note
26. Do Yoga
27. Eat only vegetables and fruits for snacks
28. Don't buy anything but necessities
29. Do 10 minutes ab work
30. Practice doing a backbend.

Okay I'm starting with #1 and #10. GO!