I get a lot of questions about our home library that I share often over on my Instagram account. I thought I’d share a bit of the building process over here. When we moved in there was an existing nook near the front of our loft ideal of a floor to ceiling library. It already had a few shelves but it was sad looking, not being used to its full potential and needed a facelift. Both Andrew and I had a dream of having a tall home library with a vintage ladder so we were determined to make one.
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Here’s the before, lacking character, feeling dated. I think the shelves are IKEA Lack shelves cut to fit into the space and supported by pieces of painted wood underneath and lots of glue.
We removed the old hollow core particle board shelves and replaced them with a pegboard shelf system. The side panels have holes where you can install shelf clips and hang your shelves at the heights you desire. These are the shelf clips we used, there are lots of varies on the market, just be sure if the shelves are holding lots of weight, use ones with metal. The shelves are made from MDF and we painted them the same colour as our walls, which is Snowfall White by Benjamin Moore.
Some in-progress photos:
A few years after moving in we finally found a vintage ladder that fit the space perfectly. Getting it home was tricky, but once it was in place, the whole library finally came together. A few years later, a publisher for Diane Keaton’s book The House That Pinterest Built asked if they could feature our library in the book. I thought this was a fake email, but it ended up being real and now it’s forever documented in her beautiful book. Here’s the photo that was featured. Read more about this over in this blog post.
Most recently the ladder is used to hold our many house plants because it’s right in front of the window with ideal light. Not sure how long this setup will last, but for now it’s working until we need to climb the ladder for some books.
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Fun fact, the vintage ladder used to be a local Hydro power ladder, I managed to find some drawings of it online. We found it on craigslist, some guy had been keeping it in his basement for years, hoping he’d find a way to use it, but it never worked out. When we told him our story and showed him some photos, he was super excited to sell it to us.
