19 January 2009

Bookcase in the studio

Remember these cabinet doors?



Four of the doors became our headboard:



Another one was turned into artwork for our bedroom - see, it's finally been hung! (Thanks, Dad!)



Which left five.

Now, remember how my photography equipment used to stand in the corner of the studio?



Well it's been packed away and replaced with an Ikea Billy bookcase that was given to us (score! Thanks, Julie!)



See how closely it fit in beneath the uplighter? Phew!



Hmm, it looked a bit stark. Plus it's the first thing you see when you walk into the studio. I'm not a huge fan of open shelving but didn't want to buy doors from Ikea, at £20 per door. (By the way, the chains you see are from my backdrops still mounted on the wall.)



So off I went with a brainwave and a tape measure. Sure enough, my idea would work so I set to work.

first I filled in the holes left by the previous handles in the doors:



Then I primed them:



And then coated each door with four coats of off-white paint until they looked like this:



The holes for the hinges on the bookcase didn't line up with the hinges for these doors because the doors were from kitchen units. So I took our trusty rusty power drill, put some masking tape on the bit so I didn't go too deep ...



... measured, marked and drilled new holes for the hinges:



As you can see, when the first doors were hung there was a gap above. A painted strip of wood screwed on sorted that out.





And voila, this is how it looks with the four doors installed! Unfortunately I ran out of knobs. I'll have to pick up another pair next time we go to Ikea.





I'm thrilled with how it turned out! It didn't cost anything since I had the doors, wood strip and paint, and the bookcase was gifted to us. Plus the moulding on the doors exactly matches the rest of the doors in desk area of the studio! I'll probably remove the basket in the top shelf, add a couple of little corbels to the top corners and dress the shelf with cute stuff eventually.

I've put my scrapbooking stuff into the cabinet so I can scrap in the studio on my little white desk that's come downstairs now. We very briefly toyed with the idea of turning this room into our living room but we like having the living room next to the kitchen, our computer desk is installed in the studio and the boys love having a big space to run about and play with Daddy in. It works for us.


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