Dining room, in progress: bookcase wall

Our dining room is, as you might have surmised from the title of this post, a work in progress.

Here is how it looked when we moved in, with sconces on the long wall and a chandelier that was hung off-center in every respect:

The first furniture we bought when we moved in were new Billy bookcases at Ikea.  We sold our old bookshelves in California, as they were about ten years old and had been damaged in our five previous moves.

In order to maximize the amount of shelves, we added height extenders. I love that the shelves go nearly to the ceiling.  If only I had room and budget for a library ladder, where I could pretend to be Belle flying around the library.

so so true

And currently:

I did not have a grand inspiration for this room at the beginning.  The wall in the dining room is the only wall in the house long enough to put a bank of bookcases.  Every other wall on the first floor could not hold more than one bookshelf consecutively. We have a multitude of windows and five doors to the outside....the only reason this wall is an unbroken stretch without windows is because the other side of it is the garage.  Ergo, this meant that the bookshelves would be going on this wall.

Unfortunately, there are two heating vents inconveniently placed on that wall, but we hacked a hole out of two sections of cardboard backs of the bottom shelves to allow for air circulation.  We also took down the sconces that were there when we moved in and plated them up.

I really do love the concept of having books in the dining room, (see the dining room in our last house here) and pinned pics of this for years.  We considered doing free-floating shelving, rather than bookcases in order to work around the vents, but in the end bookshelves won out as just looking nicer. 

My future plans are to build out the bookcases into a unit with trim and picture lights, like so:

photo via BHG

I love how the bookshelves add so much color to the room.  No, my books are not arranged by color because WHAT SORT OF MONSTER DOES--pause---deep breath---right, my librarian heart says no, no, that is not for us.  In 2002 I applied to library grad school and was accepted on the same day that I was offered my first full time law professor job.  I ended up teaching instead of getting another advanced degree, but you may rest assured that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can I advocate sorting your books by color, FFS. (Don't even get me started on backwards books.)

Two moves ago I pared down our books quite a bit.  Currently the bookshelves are split nearly evenly between adult and childrens books--the top half is adult, the bottom half is kids, mostly.  I also greatly enjoy YA, so we have a lot of it.  I need more bookshelves because I need to sort our books by subject and author and it helps if they all fit nicely on one or more shelves but sometimes that doesn't happen and the vampire romances spill over into the science section, which hurts my heart. (Heaven help the child that puts the Big Nate book back in the YA science fiction or Spanish section. If you knew where to go to find the book, you can put it back in that same section. Perhaps I am giving a glimpse into what our home life is like.  No more wire hangers.)

Next up in the dining room: Bessie the cow, the buffet wall and the saga of fourteen dressers and an excessive number of lamps.