I’m back on the case with my vintage caravan makeover and this week I’d like to share some photos of my new storage solution – a bookcase with a difference. I have plenty of books that I want to store in the caravan – mostly the ones I’ll need to use while working out there – so I have a stack of sewing, crafting, design and art books that all need a safe home.
I was driving past a skip and I spotted that this old shop display shelving has been chucked in. The skip was actually outside one of the local shops so I nipped inside and checked whether the shelves had been thrown out and whether it would okay for me to give them a new home. It turned out that this old unit has been used for the display of greeting cards! So after a lot of rearranging of seats in the back of my small car and quite a bit of shoving, I managed to bring this shelving unit home and try it out in the caravan.
Amazingly enough the unit fits perfectly in the space between the door and seats, plus the hollow back of the sloped shelves allowed it to sit over the top of the wheel arch and didn’t need any cutting down. I intended to paint the whole thing white, but when I tried putting a few books on the shelves I realised that I would never really see the actual shelves as they would be covered up by the books. So that saved me a lot of time! I simply filled the shelves with my book collection and sat back to admire my ‘hard’ work.
Looking at all the books face-on inspires me to pick them up and flick through, much more so than when housed on a bookshelf so I think I prefer storing my books this way. I might not be able to store as many books this way and could probably fit more in the same space if I was using a traditional bookshelf but I’d rather see the books and be inspired than store them away and hardly ever look at them.
Now that I’m getting on with my caravan makeover with renewed vigour after reading Vintage Caravan Style, why not check out my round-up blog post of the work I did on the caravan last year so that you can see the starting point and where I’m up to right now.