Our Ikea Billy Bookshelves Update

I totally underestimated how busy I would be over the last few months and just let the blog fall to the wayside. I had to let something go or I would have been stressed to the max. I'm going to update when I have time now instead of trying to force at least 1 out a week.

So, the last thing we worked on was painting our bookshelves and I just haven't had the time to write up what we did until today. We started with a basic Billy bookshelf from Ikea. We bought these about 5 years ago and they have served us well but this plain boring wood was not doing it for me anymore. I've been seeing blues EVERYWHERE lately, especially paint and interior design, so of course when picking out our color scheme that is what I thought of.

Here is a picture of the bookshelves before, stacked to the max of course:

and another bookshelf from Ikea on the wall diagonal from the one above.

We started out by taking the shelves out to the back porch and spraying it down with some TSP which is a heavy duty cleaner used before painting.

I wiped down all 5 units of shelving. Ace hung around and kept me company:

Next came the primer. The paint would have never stuck without priming first. Since this was a big job we headed on over to our local Harbor Freight (like Corey needs an excuse) and picked up a sprayer to use with our compressor. We used Flotrel which is an additive to add to paint to thin it out. The paint sprayer would have gotten clogged up had we not added it.

And we set to work....luckily it was an absolutely gorgeous day which allowed us to finish the priming and painting over the weekend. Corey is hard at work below.

and here I am, posing as if I am hard at work. I tried the priming but only got a few inside parts before we quickly realized Corey could do a much better, quicker job.

We primed on Saturday and painted on Sunday. The outside color is Baja by Behr.

The next week we had almost a full week of Snowcation 2011 so I decided it was the perfect time to start painting the backs of the bookshelves. I had chosen a peacock blue at Home Depot. I am trying to incorporate darker blues and some greens in the living room to break up the monotony of a room full of neutrals, so this is big start. The color is Peacock Tail by Behr. As you can see below, one coat was just the beginning.

But after 3 coats they came out beautiful! Here, they are lined up in the kitchen, all dressed up and ready to be stocked with books:

and back in the living room:

and 1 more with books. I love it! What do you think?