Bookshelves!

I have a lot of books in my house. That's sort of the side effect of being a science fiction fan and working for several years as a reviewer: you end up picking up a ton of books that catch your eyes. Since college, my library has grown, considerably. My two bookshelves expanded to 13, with stacks sprouting up everywhere I ran out of room.

For the last couple of years, we've been slowly moving one of our rooms towards a quasi-library space. It's a weird sort of room: one half is our living room, with the couch and TV. This section was shunted off as storage / overflow for that room. It's kind of dark, and while we had a couch there, it wasn't really a useful space. We ditched the couch, tore down the wallpaper, and painted the room in a bright red. I've always loved the idea of having a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, and this seemed like an ideal place to do it.

When a local builder posted up in Front Porch Forum that he was looking for work, I reached out to him, seeing if he had experience in building these. He ended up coming over, sketched out the wall, came back with some measurements and some ideas, and got to work. A couple of days later, we've got a spiffy set of bookshelves.

I'm pretty thrilled with how these look: he screwed the shelves directly into the wall studs, with the vertical supports nailed in. They're set in a bit, so they give the walls a little more of a floating effect with a narrower profile. Once it's warm enough to open the windows, I'll stain them a slightly darker color.

In all, there's about 50 feet of bookshelf space, and it filled up immediately. I underestimated how many books were stacked up. I left a bit of space in each section to allow for the collection to grow, but it'll eventually fill up, I'm sure.