It’s officially week 3 of the One Room Challenge! If you’re not familiar, the ORC is a quick turn around home makeover challenge hosted by Linda of Calling It Home and media partner Better Homes & Gardens. And I’m a bit late with my post. Oops. In the last eight days, Adam and I have collectively sanded for 15 hours, painted for 22 hours, spent 7 hours drilling aluminum spindle holders into our deck railing, spent another 18 hours screwing decking into the frame, along with countless other miscellaneous deck building tasks. If you didn’t know better and hadn’t been following along for week 1 and week 2, you might think my One Room Challenge space was our deck. But I’m actually “working on” our daughter’s room. All of the info about the deck was just to explain why I actually didn’t work on the One Room Challenge this week. Luckily I had a bit of a head start, so this week I’m going to show you how to turn ugly old bookcases into built ins!

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There are tons of great tutorials out there on how to turn old bookcases into built ins, so this isn’t a tutorial, per se, but more of a step by step process of what I did to my bookcases.

It goes without saying that these are not pretty. They are outdated, they have stickers on them that won’t come off, and the top trim doesn’t even match. Years ago, these were in my parents’ previous lake home, then when they sold that, my sister and brother-in-law took them, and when they decided to get rid of them, I thought I’d see if I could turn them into something a bit more attractive. It wasn’t a short process, and it’s not done, but I’m feeling pretty confident that they will end up looking awesome!

The first step was to start removing the existing trim pieces to make room for baseboard and crown molding.

I’m sure prying the pieces off with an old kitchen knife isn’t the proper way to do things, but it worked, so I’m happy!

I used the same method on the upper trim, but had a little bit less success.

Oops.

Thank God for wood glue and painter’s tape!

After gluing it, letting it dry, and sanding it down, it was as good as new. Not that new was super great. 😉

With the ugly trim pieces removed, the bookcases were pretty blank slates. Perfect for turning into built ins!

The next step was to cut out the baseboards to make space for the built ins.

I’m not going to lie, this step freaked me out a bit. Once I started sawing, there was no going back!

I used a flat saw I got in a miter box kit, and it worked perfectly.

The next step to turn the old bookcases in to built ins was prying the baseboards off the wall.

Once again, my old kitchen knife worked perfectly!

I had to make a few adjustments, cutting a tiny sliver of trim off each side. I’m glad I erred on the side of too small, since that was easier to fix than cutting out too much of the baseboards.

Eventually I got the perfect fit on both sides.

I’m not sure how, but my hands got pretty beat up in the process. I guess that’s the life of a DIYer.

The next step to turn old bookcases in to built ins was attaching the new matching (or almost matching – not exact, but pretty close!) baseboards to the book cases. In order to do that, I needed to raise the bookcases up a couple of inches, or the baseboards would have come up too far, above the bottom shelf, and I wouldn’t have been able to attach the doors on the bottoms of the shelves.

Once I raised them up on two 1×4 blocks, I realized there was going to be a gap underneath the bookcase and the baseboard, so I problem solved and added some wood to fill in the gap…

Using my trusty Ryobi miter saw.

The wood to fill in the gaps didn’t look great, but most of it would get covered by the baseboards.

And then I ran into another issue… Turns out that unless I cut out the carpet and pad, I was not going to be able to get the baseboard height to match what was on our walls, because that was installed BEFORE our carpet and pad. I didn’t want to cut the carpet, because that was a super permanent decision, so instead I cut down the trim.

Which was a whole new challenge, since I don’t own a table saw. I finally scored the baseboard using a ruler and a screwdrivier, and then I started sawing. By hand.

The first smaller piece took about 20 minutes. Not efficient, but not too terrible.

I eventually turned it on it’s side and sawed from the top, which helped a lot with leverage.

I wasn’t so successful with the longer piece for the front of the bookcases. I bet I worked on it for an hour and a half. I finally asked a friend with a table saw, and he cut it for me in about two minutes. That includes the time it took to take the saw out and put it away. I definitely should have gone that route in the first place!

The fit was perfect!!

Next, I secured the bookcases into studs using these brackets. I also secured them into two studs on the left side. Those babies aren’t going anywhere!

There was a pretty large gap in between certain parts of the bookcases, so I decided to fill it with caulk.

Once they are painted, it should hardly be noticeable.

I also did the same thing along the left edge to fill the gap between the bookcases and the wall.

I also had a few nail holes to fill because one of these bookcases used to have glass doors on top (that’s why the top trim didn’t match). I filled those using wood filler and then sanded.

One of the last steps to turn old bookcases in to built ins was securing the baseboards and filling the gaps with caulk.

Finally, I secured crown molding along the top. These bad boys haven’t even been painted yet, and I can already tell that I’m going to love them! And all of the storage capacity!

Remember to stop by and check out all of the other fun room transformations at the One Room Challenge blog page!

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8