Miss C of Prescott called us in to solve an unusual storage problem she was having in her dormer bedroom. She wanted some custom made bookshelves to fit along one wall. The problem was that this wall, being in a dormer bedroom, had a sloping ceiling under the eaves. No stand alone ready made or flat pack product would solve the sloping roof conundrum for Miss C.

Designing Custom Made Bookshelves

 

We love issues like this at Real Room Designs. Straight away we saw the need for purpose built custom bookshelves. The brief from the client in her own words was – “A large Bookcase or Bookshelves to fill a wall with a sloping ceiling (dormer) with a few occasional doors.” This description was initially accompanied by Image 1 which gave us a bit of a clue regarding the complexity of the design that Miss C was looking for.

wall for bookshelves

Image 1 The Initial Brief

After plenty of measuring had been undertaken for the different sizes of boxes that Miss C wanted to fit into the shelving, a plan was beginning to form. She wanted the shelving to take into account space for CD’s and DVD’s. So finally a design was confirmed as demonstrated by this CAD illustration.

bookshelves illustration

CAD Illustration

 

Getting The Bookshelves Installed

 

The next stage was to build it! Fairly obvious really….

First of all we built a frame from wall to wall incorporating a beam in the ceiling. Given there was limited space to work in this was quite a task. By putting a back to the frame we were able to cover a plain wall that had no real use or function. We cut out a hole in the back of the unit (bottom left) so the customer would still be able to use the plug socket.

bookshelves under construction

Image 2 Cabinetry Work

 

Once we had finished the cabinetry work we scribe infills, cut to the contours of the walls and ceiling and fit these to the cabinetry to make a lovely finish to the built bookshelf units.

finished bookshelves cabinetry

Image 3 The Finished Cabinetry

 

Finishing Touches

 

To make these custom made bookshelves a storage area that is both unique and different we used “five push to open” doors. These were all different sizes to enhance the random nature of the design.

bookshelves with doors

Image 4 “Push To Open” Doors – Open

 

finished bookshelves with doors closed

Image 5 “Push To Open” Doors – Closed

Each individual storage area was made to a specific size tailor made to comply with the customer’s requirements. This project entailed a lot of work for the size of the working area concerned – but what a fantastic result!

We have taken a redundant space in a dormer bedroom that stand alone furniture would never have fit. In the process we have produced great storage in a really cool style. This is another success story for Real Room Designs in designing and installing custom made bookshelves to solve the clients problems.