An IKEA BILLY Hack Turns This Dingy 1970s Room into a Dreamy Home Library
Sometimes 1970s wood-paneled spaces are great, but other times they just look old rather than retro. In Katie and Phllip Bowling’s home office, that was the case. “We loved the coziness of the small office room, but it was so dark with the old faux wood paneling,” homeowner Katie Bowling (@katiebowlinghome) says. “The carpet in the room was so worn-down.”
In an approximately $2,000 project, the husband-and-wife team gave the room a makeover that looks far more expensive.
The carpet had to go.
“We cleared out the room and the old carpet,” Katie says, adding that one of the biggest changes to the space was the flooring. She and Philip had refinished hardwood floors before, but this time around, they laid new white oak flooring and then painted it in a harlequin pattern using Benjamin Moore’s Black and sealed it with water-based polyurethane.
“We likely watched about 100 YouTube videos and then did our best,” Katie says. “I’m not too picky about things being perfect, but Philip is a little more of a perfectionist, which helps with details.” The pair used delicate painter’s tape and a 12×12 FloorPops tile to plan out the pattern, and they marked every other square with a dot of tape to know which ones to fill in with black paint.
“We knew our floors were laid straight so we used the floor boards as our guide to make sure we were not starting to stencil them crooked,” Katie writes on her blog.
She also says she initially wanted herringbone wood floors, and this was a nice budget-friendly alternative that still adds some pattern.
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There’s an IKEA BILLY hack in the room.
The next big difference-maker was the built-in shelving. She and Philip already owned the two IKEA BILLY bookcases that they used for the shelving by the door; they just built around them and added them to the left of the door frame.
They filled in holes with wood filler and painted everything — including the paneled walls, also repaired in some areas with wood filler — light blue-green (Benjamin Moore’s Smoke).
There are new cabinets and a window seat.
New style details in the room include cool clear chairs, a new flush-mount light fixture from Rejuvenation, a thrifted table used as a desk, and a hand-me-down armchair. “We considered lots of different ideas for the layout, but I liked the floating desk or table in the middle of the room because it gave us room for a window seat, too.”
The window seat (and cabinets and shelves) were built by Philip. The cabinets are stock cabinets from Lowe’s, and Philip built shelving above. Now it’s a bona fide library.
Before, “we were living with piles of books and stacks of papers in the room,” Katie says.
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