Shelves, glorious shelves!

Shelves!! My favourite thing! This was honestly one of the most exciting projects.  I guess it must be sign I am becoming more, ahem, mature when I get more excited about new shelves than I do about what i’m doing on Saturday night.

I had a wall of shelves in my old apartment.  I loved those shelves… I spent many hours re-arranging them and telling them I loved them.

A very cute, sleeping Charlie doesn’t hurt either!

In the new place I thought i’d go for a piece of furniture rather than wall shelves.  As a quick (impatient) and purse friendly option, I decided to go with some short BILLY  bookcases from, yep IKEA.

I originally wanted to put my old TV in here on top of the bookcases and had to stand it on a join as I was a little worried the weight would make the top bow. You can see Mia chilling on the corner of the rug there.  We will talk about the rugs in the house in a future post, there’s a few! But I do love that layered cowhide combo.

This arrangement did not last.  It just didn’t have any wow factor and didn’t make me smile when I looked at it.  I decided I didn’t like the huge black box of a TV in here and realised I probably wouldn’t use it much anyway.  Back to the drawing board.

When I left my old apartment, I also left all the furniture.  I literally had a mattress, 4 dining chairs and a coffee table to bring with me.  This meant I couldn’t go down the expensive, high end route with everything.  Something had to give and I went back to day dreaming about my old shelves…  As a result I turned to Ironmongery Direct who supplied my last lot of twin slot shelving brackets.

This time I decided to go with black uprights and brackets, I wanted some black in the room and didn’t want the actual shelves to be too dark and show up the dust too much!

They deliver super quick and the price is so good.  The brackets are less than a pound each!

The shelves are the Ekby Jarpen from IKEA, the shorter and narrow ones they sell.  I didn’t have loads of space for them to sit out from the wall too far.

I wanted to have the majority of my books and favourite ornaments and plants in one place to make a kind of feature wall if you like.  A lot of my plants came from this fantastic eBay Seller.  They also have their own website Perfect Plants  I’ve bought  a lot from them over the last couple of years and everything arrives well wrapped, quickly  and alive! They have some rare and unusual plants you just don’t see in garden centres or high street shops.  I’m a sucker for Cacti and anything that goes in a hanging planter.

 

They also have a weekly blog to help answer any questions you may have or just to look at the gorgeous plants.  I’ll be doing some garden posts in the future so i’ll be needing their services again! Check them out here Perfect Plants

I bought quite a large Fiddle Leaf Fig or Ficus Lyrata from them and it’s thriving, lots of new growth and not one single leaf has dropped, it has even branched.  I was convinced it would suffer during the house move and it was fine, success!

Everything looks better against the fresh, clean backdrop of white walls so the first thing to do was get rid of that Magnolia paint.  Arghhh…. I wasn’t feeling the magnolia and grey combo and that randomly placed wall shelf you can see below had it’s days numbered.

The stairs in the house are winders and the bottom of the staircase juts out into the dining area so I couldn’t go full height, wall to wall with the shelves.

I decided to go from the wall nearest the window, across as far as I could.  This left a gap under the underneath of the staircase to put a nice comfy armchair and a small side table.

The Billy bookcases ended up making excellent storage for the shed. At the price they were I wasn’t too upset about using them for tool and garden storage and I needed some sort of storage solution in there anyway.

The shelves went up and I finally got to put things away and clear some space and empty boxes that I was tripping over.  My books had a home and I could start the fun part of arranging things.

Here they are, I tried to put the heaviest things on a join with a bracket offering extra support.

What do you think? What would you have done with this space? Traditional bookcases or open shelving? Share your thoughts!