An IKEA BILLY Hack Totally Transforms This Boring Brown & Beige Wall
ABOUT THIS BEFORE & AFTER
HOME TYPE: House
PROJECT TYPE: Dining Room, Furniture
STYLE: Glam, Parisian, Traditional
SKILL LEVEL: DIY
RENTAL FRIENDLY: No
When it comes to adding built-in shelving to your home, take DIYer Sophie Murphy’s (@thelistedtownhouse) advice: “A library wall can work equally well within a new-build as it does a historic home,” Sophie says. It all depends on paint color and styling, of course. (For inspiration, check out these 11 built-in bookshelf projects.)
In Sophie’s own home, she built a library wall in her dining room and painted it a creamy off-white (House of Hackney’s Narcissus). The room went from brown-panelled and dingy to bright, elegant, and storage-packed.
3 IKEA BILLYs provides ample shelving.
“The room felt too large, and it wasn’t cozy,” Sophie says of the before. “We felt like adding a feature library wall could add storage as well as make the room feel warmer … we also wanted to make a statement and a “wow,” as it’s the first room that you see when you walk into our home.”
One of the first steps of the project was relocating a radiator and some sockets and switches so that the built-in shelving could go where they wanted, and then Sophie and her husband, Colin, built a base out of 3x2s and used three IKEA BILLYs (trimmed down a bit so they fit the width of the wall).
The next step was making the BILLYs look built-in.
“We then added MDF strips around the bookcases to make them look ‘built-in,’” Sophie explains. “From this, we then added trim, primed, and painted them.”
Sophie says a wall-to-wall project this size was a first for her and Colin, but “something as big as this doesn’t need to cost a fortune, and you also don’t need to have a carpenter.” She and Colin used leftover paint and wood from a previous project and BILLY bookcases from Facebook Marketplace to keep costs low.
Their project total was about £100, or $124 USD. “It just brings the room to life,” Sophie says. “The space now makes me feel both proud that we could do it and also complete — it completes an otherwise unused area.”
Sophie says if she could change one thing about the project, she might add even more trim around the bookcases, and she and Colin definitely plan to add a bookcase ladder — another DIY project on their to-do list. For more IKEA BILLY inspiration, take a look at these 15 built-in BILLY projects.
Inspired? Submit your own project here.
Further Reading
See How a Stager Used Paint to Transform a 1950s Living Room
