Ikea Upgrade: Bookcases

A couple of weekends ago, Chris and I went to Ikea to buy bookshelves, because as it turns out 99.9% of my material possessions are books (the other 0.1% is dog toys). This is just a small taste of the number of boxes of books that we moved:

Needless to say, I couldn't get away with not having bookshelves. I picked up two 50$ BILLY bookcases from Ikea in white:

These bookshelves are perfect in that they are large, cheap, and have clean lines. That being said, they are a little boring and do scream IKEA!! Since I am trying to trick my friends and family into thinking I am an adult, I wanted to make these look like more than 50 dollar bookcases. I found a beautiful idea on Pinterest, where a woman stenciled the back of her bookcases to add color and pattern. It looked amazing, but then I remembered that stenciling is  a lot of work and I'm not yet trained in the art of not-making-a-huge-mess-with-paint. So I decided on my own little twist: Fabric!

Isn't it perfect? I was smitten. A special thanks to the lady at Jo-ann's who was nice enough to explain that each baton doesn't have the same width and then wait while I worked out the math. So after I got my fabric home and started to build my bookcases I needed to line the back of the bookcases, which without fabric look something like this:

So i laid out the fabric to make sure it would fit. All that extra time thinking at Jo-ann's paid off, because it fit:

Then I flipped it over and taped it into position:

I used Chris' fancy Gorilla Tape and to be honest, I don't think I could get that fabric off even if I tried. After I doctored up the back of the bookcase, I built it as per the instructions to get this:

I'm in love! Here is a close up:

I rinsed, washed, and repeated to have two matching bookcases. I think they look much better than the cheap bookcases they were before. All in all, this project wasn't that intense or expensive and I would totally do it again. Now I just have to get around to putting all those books away...