5.19.2010

Family Room: Built-in Bookshelves

I am a HUGE fan of built-in bookshelves. I think they add a lot of architectural interest and loads of storage. Jim has recently finished up the new bookshelves in our family room. This is the third built-in he has built in our house, but I still have a few more planned.

All of our built-ins are fairly consistent: floor-to-ceiling with integrated crown molding and baseboard; painted white to match the trim in the house, and made with adjustable bookshelves. The variations come on the bottom - cabinets, bookshelves, or file drawers. Jim has fully built each set top to bottom with the exception of the file drawers in our home office which we purchased at an unfinished furniture store.

New bookshelves and cabinet are in the corner of our new family room. It was a somewhat awkward corner to begin with because of the shape of our addition. We needed a place to stash our audio/video components for our home theater system. The flat screen resides over the fireplace so nowhere to put the components - although they did look pretty great on the mantle for 5 months or so!

The lower cabinet has 2 shelves and holds the receiver, cable box, Blu-ray player, and subwoofer. There's a little room left for a few boxes of DVDs. Fortunately we anticipated that it would get pretty warm under there so we used radiator cover screen (found it at Home Depot) to give it a paneled look. We also installed a heat sensitive fan to circulate the air. We are also considering putting some holes on the top to ventilate it further because it is definitely very warm in there after we watch a movie or an NCIS marathon (we're geeks).

Next up is filling the shelves with our book collection and other collectibles hanging around our house.