I see what you mean by the actual width of a CD. I have a skinny one made out of cheap wood that is less than 6" wide, I guess I was thinking that most were that width. The cheapie has thin wooden slats to hold the cds. If I did use a couple of those it would take a lot of dressing up before it looked even halfway decent. The Billy wall shelf WAS on my list of possibilities. Turned on itÂs side, though, at 13 ¾, itÂs an inch too wide. IÂm going on a field trip to Ikea tomorrow to look for other possibilities, and bring a sample shelf with me to check colors in other lines. I plan to stop at Hobby Lobby too. bronwynsmom, please go ahead! Get carried away! Maybe by brainstorming with all of you IÂll come up with the perfect thing. If I could find a wine rack with solid shelves rather than slats that would be great. The slats make it too obvious that itÂs meant for wine. Given that the room is upstairs, I donÂt think weÂd ever want to store wine there. Gets a little too hot and sunny in the summer. We store our wine in the basement (when itÂs not being used up too quickly to be stored). But that gives me another search term I can use. Possibilities! When I was redoing my kitchen a few years back I remember looking into a unit that would go horizontally underneath a cabinet that has small niches or cubbies. I think it was called a spice drawer unit. You could order it with or without drawers, or small wicker baskets. I dropped the idea then, because it was really expensive. Maybe I can find one again, without drawers, just shelves. WHY does every project I start turn out to be so COMPLICATED?!? And itÂs always some stupid little thing that stalls it.

Zipdee, I just had a brilliant idea. Since you already have white bookcases....and they are a little bit away from the current fireplace....what about building a surround to go around that one making it all look like it was done that way in the beginning. If you take a straight on photo showing the fireplace and the bookcases I'll do a virtual for you. Oh and if you have a straight on of the style of surround you like I'd put that one in there for you so you can see if that's what you really want. Can you tell I really don't want you to paint your current fireplace yet? Wish I could make you a new one and take that one. Our home is a Victorian Revival and I'd love a fireplace surround like that.

Sometimes you just have to be creative and think outside of the box in order to get the look that you really want. Sure the billy bookcases are a bit shallow, but they aren't the only book cases available at Ikea and Ikea will give you the best bang for your buck. ALL of these built ins are IKEA, all the diyer did was add trim and mouldings to the fronts to cover the seams. Some are modern in style, others more traditional but the billies aren't just "bookcases", they come with a lot of options, like glass doors. Several of these actually look like they were professionally done.

Oh, that looks lovely but unfortunately a bench is out since there is not enough width between the wall and a window for it to make sense (you can see the edge of the curtain in my picture above). It's also a difficult living room for furniture arrangement since there are two double width door openings, one from the hall then one from the dining room with sliding pocket doors. The third wall has the fireplace and built in bookcase and the fourth is almost all window (but no direct light unfortunately). The idea of a second bookcase, I agree, would add more symmetry to that wall but I'm imagining it will be on the expensive side and we're trying to keep this low budget (hence the idea to whitewash). If I understand correctly, you feel we can't whitewash without painting the bookcase and mantel and even then you feel we would need to add something (bookcase or bench) to the opposite side of the fireplace. One other idea we had was to leave the fireplace unpainted but add an oak board that we would stain the same color as the mantel to cover up the top three rows of bricks (including the vertical ones that stick out) making it less busy. I worry that even doing that, it won't be enough. Finally, what about adding a surround in wood? I'm supposing if we do that we would have to paint the mantel and bookcase a similar color, correct? And there would still be the problem of symmetry. I should mention that there is a lot of oak mouldings throughout the house. Some of these we have painted already as they were just too dark and with over 100 years of soot and dirt were going to be too difficult to clean. We did leave the mouldings of several of the doorframes and the pocket doors to the dining room in the natural oak. There are two built in oak china cabinets in the dining room which is why we were trying to preserve the oak bookcase. But the more I see pictures of painted bookcases, the more I'm tempted to paint ours. Here is something quite similar to ours. What do you think?