Furniture Friday: Building bookshelves into the wall

My husband and I LOVE to utilize wasted space between walls!  I mean, it's very name is asking for use and purpose - we don't want wasted space!  This post shows our two between-the-studs transformations in our master bath; this post we built small shelves between the studs in a half-wall to hold all my kitchen baking goods; while this post only gave a sneak peak into the bookshelves we made in our tiny office.   (All seen below)

   

      

Those bookshelves are what we're going to focus on today.  In the post about the computer desk, I mentioned that we had a beautiful window in our stairwell that wasn't being utilized because of the west facing wall in this small "office".  However, we couldn't just knock out the wall completely because we didn't want children falling into the basement...because that would be bad.  ;-)  So, using the same concept as our half-wall baking good shelves, we set to building.

 The entrance to our basement used to be in the garage but before we moved in, this entrance was added.  Since the wall to the small office is directly next to the opening the basement, we felt that we could utilize the space between the studs and add another 6 inches out over the entrance. 

 Because I would be painting this, it didn't matter how the wood looked before so most of our wood pieces were purchased from the Habitat Re-Store.   

 We pre-built each of the four units in our garage and then moved them into place and nailed them to the floor joists and existing wall studs.  Then covered each set with 1x4s to hide the fact that they were separate units. 

Then I caulked like crazy!

Primed and painted. 

And enjoyed our new bookshelves! Ah, the natural light; it's so wonderful!!