Billy Wall Shelf Built In

Materials: Four Billy wall shelves, paint stirrers, 12 soup cans, board

Description: For this hack, My husband and I purchased four Ikea Billy Wall Shelves to create a "built in" look in our small breakfast area. We live in a very small house without a formal dining area and we happen to love books, so it seems as if everything has to play double duty.

To create the hack, We assembled the four wall shelves and stacked them on top of each other and beside each other. This caused some problems as they sagged from the weight of the heavy books. They were also just sitting on the ground. Looked too much like the Expedit series and not very much like a built in.

To correct the problem of the shelves sagging, we placed paint stirrers between the bookshelves (about 5 in between each wall shelf). We stacked the shelves on top of 12 soup cans spaced evenly under the shelves. My husband and I lived with the "industrial look" of the soup cans for a while until I realized we could just cover them up by placing a board in front of them. We found a board at our local home improvement store and stained it to match. We looked into buying mid century legs for the unit, but what we were finding were very expensive, so the board ended up being a very inexpensive $20 fix. We love our bookshelf--it goes very nicely with the Ikea blinds we have hanging in the area.

~ Kathryn Mayo and Doug Winter, Sacramento