Doorway Bookshelf

3/1/2019

I have always been fascinated by older houses and their history. Every new owner changes something and these are passed onto the next people living in the space. Our house is not any different. The grand staircase going up the centre of the house has many doors leading off into various rooms, but one of these doors is a fake!

The original house used to have a separate bathroom and water-closet (WC), but a few owners ago this layout was changed and the two rooms were knocked through to create a spacious en suite for one of the bedrooms, and the bathroom was moved into one of the bedrooms (Link to see this space). This left two redundant doors in the hallway, as the access to this room was though a new doorway directly into the bedroom. A while ago one of the owners decided to get rid of one of the door ways and leave the other (who knows why!), but this created the perfect opportunity for my project! I have always wanted to create a doorway bookshelf. I believe that storing books in a redundant doorway has a magical, naria-esque, romance to it. The mystery of where that door lead to, is mirrored in the mysteries held amongst the pages of those books held within it.

The above photos show some of the inspirational shots you can also see on my staircase board on Pinterest. With these I wanted to freshen up our space. Our door doesn't open or needed to be walked through like the blue one above (although these doors are super cool and some amazing IG folk have got these beauties - see below). So the process was relatively simple!

Here is the doorway before, tricks you into believing there is a room to be explored though it, but no! So what we did was:

Take the handle off and prime and paint the door
Measure out the distances on the internal aspect of the door frame (beware as in old houses like mine, these dimensions change by a few millimetres depending on where in the door frame you measure)
Take into consideration the depth of the frame, ours was around 11cm so only very narrow books or objects would be placed here.
Make some sort of bracket to keep the shelf up, you can drill the shelf directly into the frame, use metal brackets or do what we did - which was use thick beading nailed into the frame.
Cut wood to the size of the shelves - prime and paint.
Measure where you want the shelves to be and place the brackets level to eachother and rest the shelves above it. It is recommended that you fix the shelves to the bracket to prevent them from slipping forward if someone holds onto them

Last thing to do, is style it with your favourite pieces. We chose travel books and story books for adults and children so that on our way to bed we get inspired to delve into a fantasy, be it travel or fiction.

Hope you like how it has turned out, we couldn't be more chuffed with the end result! And yes that lamp is the PERFECT size for the space and gives a gorgeous glow at night when you do not want the main lights on.

Please leave comments and feedback below. xoxo

, Btw as mentioned above, here are some other beautiful doorway bookshelves from some real homes in the UK! If you know of any others please send them to me!