Built-in bookshelves: Ikea Billy hacking
In the world of customizing Ikea furniture, I feel like there's hacking (lowercase 'h') and then there's Hacking (uppercase 'H'). The difference between the two goes something like this:
- hacking /ˈhakiNG/ verb: to alter Ikea furniture by means of customizing it, generally by upgrading hardware, painting it, or other straightforward methods
- Hacking /ˈhakiNG/ verb: to completely and permanently alter Ikea furniture by means of using the supplied materials as a mere starting point, before creating something wholly unique
The lowercase form of Ikea hacking is all over the internet. With Billy bookcases, especially. There are scores of videos and blogs detailing folks' projects of taking the simple and humble Ikea Billy bookcase and framing it to look like a built-in bookshelf. There's a whole website dedicated to Ikea hacking. Also, a subreddit. It's definitely a thing. I'm a little envious of those folks.
Our built-in bookshelf project is Hacking, definitely with a capital H. Mostly because there's a window in the middle of the wall on which we're building all of our shelving. That means we have to cut everything to fit perfectly around the window. Sure, we could do it simpler than we are, but unfortunately that's not how we operate. The window was why we had to do most of the customization. The other reasons ours is more complicated than most is because we're adding custom wood trim fronts to every shelf and installing custom lighting. With the lighting finished, it was time to cut up literally every single piece of three Billy bookcases.
Yay!
Step one: Rip down every shelf to accommodate for the depth of the custom wood front and then cross-cut every shelf to create the custom width (I used my trusty cross-cut sled that Scott made me for my particular table saw similar to this one)
Step two: Take the third bookshelf and cut down the sides to create the custom height extensions
Step three: rip the notch wider in the back of the sides to fit the 5mm plywood backing we're using
With everything now all cut to their custom dimensions, we ended up with piles of Ikea pieces ("A" was one bookshelf, "B" was the other). The labels were critical.
From that pile, we now had to recreate all the cut-off ends. For Billy, this entailed using the following:
- 3/16" drill bit (pre-drilled holes for cam screws and the smaller hole for the shelf pegs)
- 5/16" drill bit (dowel and cam screw holes as well as countersink for shelf pegs)
- 3/8" Forstner bit (plastic shelf cams)
- Drill guide
- Combination square
- Scratch awl or nail/hammer to use as center punch for drilling (or, heck, a center punch)
- Sharp pencil
I used the cut off ends as templates to recreate the final Ikea pieces and transferred all hole centers by way of a combination square and pencil. I taped each drill bit to make sure I'd get the depth correct.
It was a methodical process. To check for the depth of the 3/8" screw cam hole (this had to be fairly precise, as did honestly every single hole I drilled), I taped a nail to my combo square.
About that precision: every hole had to be precise or the dowels wouldn't line up between two attaching pieces, the screws wouldn't align with the cams, or the shelves themselves wouldn't butt up perfectly against the backing. I took my time. At some point, a dinosaur came into the garage and surprised me!
It was also snowing the whole day. We certainly picked a prime time to build bookshelves…
There was, as always, coffee…
With every piece finally customized, it was time to move onto the next fairly monumental not-really-suited-for-mid-winter task: painting and finishing.
