Redo Your Small Bathroom To Maximize Space: Part II – Built-in Book Shelves

…so, now, you are wondering what we did in the office to complete the remodeling of that room. We removed the wall board from the office wall to accommodate the depth of the two shelving units that we installed in the bathroom for added storage. This left us with wonderful, flush mounted shelving units in the bathroom, the backs of which were now sticking out into the office – about 8”.

Well, the office, too suffers from a lack of storage space. Once a bedroom, it has a very small closet, inconveniently situated right behind the room’s entry door. To use the closet, we must enter the room, close the office door, and then open the closet door. Then we must reverse the process, closing the closet door so we can open the office door and leave the room.

We planned to wall off the closet on the office side, as we really don’t need to hang up clothes in the office.

The closet, though, backs onto our tiny kitchen, and we already have drawn up plans to open the back of closet to the kitchen and re-purpose it to hold a micro-convection unit and a standard wall-mounted oven.

As we plan to install the wall oven at chest level, with the micro-convection oven above it, there will be ample storage space under both units to hold all our pots and pans, including the extra large lasagna pans and the turkey roaster.

…back to the office…

We have installed tall bookshelves along the closet wall. Another great IKEA find, they hold most of our reading material quite nicely, but can no longer accommodate our growing stash of how-to and gardening magazines.

The office also doubles as an extra bedroom, with the help of a fold-out couch, a hide-a-bed, that usually sits against the wall that now has two bathroom shelving units sticking out of it.

Fear not, though...we have a plan.

We framed in the back of the bathroom cabinets, making a roughly 3' wide bump-out in the center of the office wall, about a 10” incursion into the office. Then we framed in a new wall flush with that.

We finished the bottom 1/3 of the newly built-out wall with bead board, to about a 3’ height, and added molding along the top of it to create the look of wainscoting. Then we added braces and supports to the studs on either side of the bump-out, above the new wainscoting, and slid in the short book case units we had already salvaged.

We had retrieved them from the rec room in our last home, and refinished them with a light oak stain to match the desks and IKEA shelving.

These short units, now nesting cozily into the wall just above the wainscoting on either side of the bump-out were not only easy on the budget, they saved us the time and expense of having to build in and finish new shelves. The addition of some crown molding and side trim gave our pre-made units a custom look and feel for a fraction of the cost, and certainly added an upscale look to the office.

Renovating a small house can be a bit like working on a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Anything you do in one room affects what you do in another, and any space you can find in one room is likely to be some that you have to steal from another. With careful planning, though, you can achieve some truly amazing results.