How To Give New Bookcases Rustic Charm

This post is brought to you by who kindly partnered with me to make this part of the project possible.

Do y’all remember what this room looked like before Kevin’s parents added on to our house and we started personalizing it with Billy bookcases from Ikea?

Me neither, because this is the only picture I have to look back at:

I guess I never snapped one of the other side of the room. :-/

If you’re new around here, our house went into foreclosure before the builder was even finished in 2005, and it sat empty for seven years before the bank finally handed us the keys in 2012. For three quarters of a decade no one wanted to dote on the place…well, unless you count the vines.

That all changed the minute we moved in and this bookcase project has been such a fun way to add storage. I’d still like to paint the whole thing with white chalk paint (because some of the bookcases are older than others and have yellowed a bit over time), but what a difference the planks have made!

I also used hot glue to attach some vintage locker numbers I got on Etsy and filled the holes with museum putty that I colored black (with a Sharpie) once it had hardened.

Oh! And if you’re not familiar with , it’s very thin, adhesive-backed, reclaimed wood and this particular style is called Hamptons.

We just stuck it right to the bookcase doors and used a rubber brayer to press it down hard into place. The upper parts of each door were glass and the still stuck to it like a charm! (And in case you’re wondering why I covered the glass- I needed these cabinets to hide a whole bunch of stuff we don’t want to see all the time.)

I liked the way Lauren’s book, , looked propped open on one of the shelves.

Instead of choosing which page it was open to, I just let a page choose me. It ended up being the chapter called “Risk & Confidence”. I loved this part:

Confident spaces don’t necessarily translate to a broad audience, but to those they do appeal to, the appreciation is deep and intense.

So here’s to having fun customizing our homes…and our hidden storage. 😉

See you Wednesday, friends!

Layla