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by Robin
We’re working room by room to create a comfortable and beautiful basement retreat. We are so proud of the basement bathroom we built (from a closet!) – but it’s beauty only exaggerates how blah the guest room is. So we’re fixing that! We’re adding character and colour and function.
Our basement guest room had what a guest needed: a bed, a door, functional lighting, hand-me-down furniture to hold stuff and sleep on.
A guest could not complain too loudly that we didn’t provide the basics – especially since we added a beautiful powder room next door!
What the guest room lacked was any sort of character. A beigey-peach box is the most eloquent description possible for this super bland space:
We are a family of bookworms – despite our recent Kindle love – we have lots of actual paper books that we treasure. We needed a dedicated space to display them.
If you’ve hung out here before, you know we have a fixation with building built-ins too. So, of course, Billy bookcase built-ins are on our list and this room was begging for them!
The built-in would provide lots of character – but we wanted to guild the lily a bit.
We love the look of exposed brick. Our basement is a concrete block foundation – not exposure worthy – decidedly not romantic looking – a bit more prison-y.
We considered adding a brick look tile – it’s so beautiful! But then we added up the cost – and considered the labour involved. Cue the sad trombone.
But on a trip to Home Depot we discovered their faux brick panelling. Cue the happy piccolo! The texture is wonderful! The colours are…well…the texture is wonderful!
So we’re adding a lot of character to this room with PAINTED exposed brick – including the backs of these DIY wall to wall bookshelves. When lit from above the texture will be subtle and charming.
(You could also do the same look with any panelling – we did beadboard in the back of our upstairs staircase built-in bookcase).
Here’s how we added faux brick panelling to the back of our IKEA Billy hacked built-in wall-to-wall bookcase…
DIY Faux Brick Backed Bookshelf
Materials:
- Billy bookcase (or another similar like this)
- Brick texture panel(s)
- Saw (we used a table saw – but a circular saw would work too.)
- Finishing nails
- Primer and Paint
Brick Backed Bookshelf Steps:
Plus, in our “do more with less” style – we’ve even reused the original backing material from the Billy bookcases for a gorgeous – and almost free – vertical shiplap project in this room. More on here!
Melanie Brooks
Monday 9th of April 2018
Why did you turn the bookcases upside down?What are you doing with the bottom half of them?
frugalfamilytimes
Monday 9th of April 2018
What a great eye you have, Melanie! Yes - we turned them upside down for a reason. That post is coming soon - we have a few things to finish on the bookshelves first. Essentially, did it so that we would have room on the top to mount library light sconces over each bookshelf. There is so little height in our basement we needed to install them upside down to have enough space on top. Coming soon!
Cindy
Thursday 29th of March 2018
Lovely! I can't wait to see the rest of your guest room
frugalfamilytimes
Thursday 29th of March 2018
Thank-you!! We’re having trouble finishing the guest room because of a steady stream of weekend guests! Coming soon - and I think you’ll really like it! :)