Detail #1: The Window Seat Is BUILT!

I am BRIMMING with EXCITEMENT, you guys.

Despite illness and birthdays and snafus and what have yous, we bust this thing out and made it functional instead of, you know, letting it sit for six months half-built and shrugging our shoulders and telling ourselves we'll get to it except we wait until the last possible moment, say, before we have a crapton of people over for something or other and then we whirlwind complete it not to what we imagined but just to what will work and call it a slightly defeated day.

NOPE. NONE OF THAT THIS TIME, KIDDIES.

Anyway, I know you're here for the photos, so let's get to it:

ISN'T IT SO PRETTY?!?

Obviously, things have changed a little bit since the last time you saw it. After living with the shorter BILLY bookcases and the purple painted backs for a week or so, two things became apparent: the bookcases were tragically too short, making the whole space feel crunched and that the purple wasn't translating as fun and bright as we'd hoped.

So we made a trek to IKEA for the taller BILLYs and I let Kyle pick out a color for the first time in ever. 

The taller bookcases were actually about two inches too tall for the set-up as we had it, so we hacked them (literally) to make them fit while still keeping their structural integrity. Years upon years of building IKEA furniture will allow you to do that with ease, I'm afraid to say.

We used casing to act as a small crown around the top to hide our hacking, and used the wall-mounting brackets that came with the BILLYs to really secure them in place, lest a child gets curious.


We also used a wider chair rail around the entire bottom of the seat to mask the bottom of the bookcases and to add some extra protection where little hands and feet and claws and butts will often be.

The color Kyle chose out of our stash in the basement is the lime green from the kitchen -- and at first I was really afraid that it would look awful since the berry purple became kind of a bloody wine cooler color without direct sunlight. But, as he pointed out, both kids have lime green as accent colors in their rooms and it would echo the bright yellow of the bathroom upstairs.

And he was right.

Our kids' book collection looked a bit sadder with the taller cases, so I pulled some of our books out of the basement, as well as some I'd been hoarding in Tova's room (along with her book ends) and some random bits of decor from around the house to fill in the gaps.

None of it is permanent -- in fact, I've already moved some things around, but that's the beauty of bookcases, right? Things are meant to be moved about.

I also took down the old curtain rod (and moved it to Tova's room where it's making her curtain sitch 1000% better than that cheap thing we had going on before) and since IKEA re-introduced the TUPPLUR roller blinds sans choke hazard, I picked one of those bad boys up to keep the privacy from our neighbors without creating a lot of fuss.

Painting the window seat and trim kind of forced me to touch up the window trim here, too, so it's extra fresh and clean looking. Now I just have to do everything else upstairs to match.

Moving on to the DRAWERS!

I know I showed you the trim on the front before, but here it is in full glory. The big decorative bumper there, if you will, is a piece of the wide chair rail and then a thicker, more ornate rail on top of it. I think it really seals the look of the built-in.

I also showed you the framed-off fronts before, but here they are with hardware. I opted for something clean, classic, and elegant to match the rest of the upstairs fixtures. I thought those half-arch file cabinet looking ones might be too heavy, plus kind of a pain to open without reaching waaaaaaay down to grab it. This I can open with a foot. Because I use my feet to do basic tasks. Like a primate. 

And the kind of best thing is that they're just on straight-roll casters, so super easy to roll in and out, I don't have to worry about them jumping tracks or anything, and I can clean underneath them easy peasy. I'd show you the drawers pulled out, but that's really hard to photograph since they're literally at the top of the stairs when pulled out plus it took us about twelve nanoseconds after the paint dried for us to start storing things in them because for the rest of all time we will need every square inch of storage we can get our hands on.

Now hopefully you're aware enough to realize that this post wasn't titled as finished, because, well, it's not. We still have a couple more beasts to tackle before we can officially stamp this as DONE, but I just couldn't wait to show you how beautiful the window seat is all on it's own, without any extras.

I'm so proud of the work we did on this one, and I can't wait to show you what's next.

We are being reimbursed for our use of PureBond products, however all opinions and viewpoints are strictly our own.