Here's the sofa area with the picture lowered and area filled out. Showing the addition of a coffee table in two shapes. And also trying lighter mats on the pics to brighten things up. I love what you have going. It just needs to be completed and filled out some : ) The colors are just gorgeous and make for a wonderful and comforting setting to spend time. You might want to start another thread, as this one is bogged down with a lot of pics. Also, once the images become oversized and the text doesn't wrap anymore, a lot of people won't look anymore as it can't be read easily.

yes--that is a good point about expense of this unit vs other options--but would like to get idea for what it WOULD cost to build and need some better specifics than just that photo... putting a sofa in this room and some pre-fab bookcases on couple of the walls would be less expensive and still address our desire to use it as more a reading/computer room for me but my husband would not want his 70 yr old sister to sleep on a fold-out couch no matter how comfortable the mattress might be...and this is the extra bedroom downstairs...more convenient for me as well rather than using one of the two bedrooms upstairs on day to day basis... we are planning on being here for long time--right now we don't have any bedroom furniture for this room because we have single/trundle beds in two bedrooms that we aren't going to be using in this house we are upgrading our daughter and her husband to real queen mattress vs their double--and taking their full-size mattress which is still in good shape for the 4th bedroom upstairs... some of the furniture in our master now will probably get moved up to that room since our new master is really too small for probably anything but the king bed and bedside chests--maybe room for double dresser under the wall-mounted flat-screen tv going opposite the bed--but just have to see how narrow the walkway past the bed is... like I said the new master is not that large but my husband really liked the back yard/other features of the house...he says we don't really spend any time in master except to sleep now (basically true) and the new master closet has built-in chests and shelfs to help with clothes storage... we can even move in some ready-made chests if we need too

Thanks for the input! I think I'm afraid to commit to permanent placement of things which is why I'm looking at individual bookcases instead of builtins. :) Paint has certainly been considered--especially when I was thinking I could make IKEA work--but aside from yellow walls and a white ceiling, there's no paint to match. I'd rather stick to a wood finish so that in the future I can shuffle the bookcases around...split up the set and stick them in the kids' bedrooms, whatever. I do like those green bookcases though! But I'm looking for something simpler and midcentury-inspired and I'm not sure that would work as well with paint as a traditionally detailed bookcase. I don't think the cherry would darken the room much (maybe all the junk/books inside would, though). I'm looking at unstained cherry which darkens into a medium light orange tone. This is in a low ranch house with 8 ft ceilings and I don't think bookcases can be tall enough to be oppressive in there. But it sounds like dark wood is out!

@Woodbern I hired someone to paint for me, so I don't know all the details on the steps they took to prep the wood. I think what you will need to do will depend on the condition and type of your surface and the type of paint you choose. I used 2 gallons of Sherwin Williams 7006 "Extra White" semi-gloss over one gallon of a water based primer (similar to Kilz but SW brand). Hope that helps! Good luck!!