We got an estimate for built-in bookcases in our living room recently - $8K. I found Billy bookcases available in the color (white, which is really off-white), height, and combined width that they fill the same space almost perfectly. $220! We just got them this past weekend. No, they do not look as good as built-ins would in our old house, but they provide us with the shelf space we need while we save some pennies for the real thing someday. Or not, if we wind up moving first. Also, I had a slight hesitation about built-ins for resale purposes because the room is somewhat narrow and a future owner might want to arrange furniture differently than us, and built-ins *could* become a liability. We drove 2 hours each way to pick them up. That's the first time I've been to Ikea in probably 15 years. I don't remember now what the shipping costs were but they were a significant percentage of the cost of the bookcases themselves. Slate had an article about Ikea delivery recently. Here is a link that might be useful: Slate article

Rmkitchen, or anyone else...I LOVE this concept!! I have been inspired to try this in my own daughter's room. She is 16, and is a book lover, a CD lover and a packrat. Oh and she is taking a set of courses this year as a junior that seem identical to a Lit major in college! (Women's Literature, Literature of Science Fiction, AP Brit Lit, and Philosophy of Fiction). It all adds up to lots of books and stuff in her room. Anyway my questions are: -What widths do the Billy bookcases come in? The website is really not all that easily navigated, at least for me. I *think* the cases come in 15 1/2 or 31 1/4 inch widths. The CD shelves seem to be 7 7/8 inch wide. But are there any other widths to choose from? -Is there anywhere either on the IKEA site or elsewhere I could plug in my wall dimensions and get ideas for the best combination of cases to fill the space? I've been trying to do it by just calculating myself but I end up with one wall having almost a 7 inch gap. There must be a systematic way to do this! -You mentioned using a board across a doorway. I have a window so that is something I might want to do. How did you attach the board? Seems that if I just laid a board across it would either have to be the entire width of the room, or it would disrupt the line of the extensions on either side. -For trim, did you do anything at the bottom? And you mentioned putting in a soffit at the top to attach the crown. How did you do that-glue, nails? Any help appreciated. The IKEA store in my area is quite a distance so I'm trying to do a run tomorrow to avoid the weekend crowds. Ann

This is exactly what I did here in my office. The Billy bookcases fit perfectly, and the cost was WAY less than if I had custom-built them myself. Mine are black/brown, with two extension units on top that make them 9' high. In order to attach them to the wall, I added a horizontal piece under the top shelf of the main unit and screwed them to the wall like you'd attach a kitchen cabinet ... if that makes any sense. Ikea supplies L brackets for this, but I felt more secure doing it a more traditional way. I still have to trim out the bottoms. I have to cut and customize those pieces so I can extend the a/c vents in the floor, and I just haven't done it yet. I needed a little more width on the right hand side of this corner to make the shelves balance on each side of the window. We attached a CD rack between the two units to give us the extra width ... and a place to put our CDs. Hopefully, these photos show what you're looking for. Connie Here is a link that might be useful: house and garden blog

nosoccermom, thank you so much! I do not NEED a book case, just figured that this is nice for me to display my dishes and cute pots as I have many. The floating shelves and the cabinet looks very nice and modern, I have to really think about it. Errant_gw, thank you so much! What I really want is, first of all, look modern and simple. Secondly, differentiate dinning room from the kitchen as the two is right next to each other and I don't have much space in the dining room. :)