DIY Living Room Built-Ins Reveal sharing the finished look of our fireplace built-ins.
Oh goodness! I’m so excited to share with you this reveal of our living room built-ins!
These built-ins have been a dream of mine for years and I honestly wasn’t sure if we would ever get around to building them.
When Roger first drew our house plans I planned on having built-ins installed on either side of our fireplace.
But as we began building we realized that we needed to cut back on some things in order to stay as close to budget as possible (which we still went over).
And one of the many things we chose to eliminate from our plans was the living room built-ins.
But I didn’t give up!
I had a dream and a vision and I was determined to see it through.
The photos above are what this wall looked like last fall and Christmas.
During the building process, we talked to a variety of people to get quotes with the hopes of having them built (outside of our construction loan) before we moved in.
We talked to the person who installed our custom kitchen cabinets (which was a whole other mess, some of which I wrote about here), the man who did all of our wainscoting and fireplaces (side note, we redid the woodwork on the outer hearths of 2 of our fireplaces while building these built-ins. You can see the before of this fireplace hearth in the pictures above), as well as an outside carpenter who hadn’t worked on our house.
I can’t remember all of the quotes that we received, but the one I still have on record for a design very similar to what we built was $4,000.
And guess what!?
We were able to build these built-ins for under half the cost!!
These built-ins came in at ~$1828.62 and that includes the $269.80 shipping cost for the base cabinets!
And I put the little “~” because some receipts had other purchases on them for other projects, so I rounded up for tax on the cost of each item to make sure that the total cost above is as close as possible to how much it cost us.
Oh, and I just remembered that we used leftover wainscoting from our house build for the top of the built-ins as well as some of the extra paint from our DIY floating shelves.
But even if we were to add in those two costs the total would still be well under half the quoted cost, and that is a total win in my book!
At the beginning of this year, Roger drew up a design plan for the built-ins (you can see a DIY tutorial blog post for these built-ins here and a video tutorial here) and in February we ordered the base cabinets.
Then the world came to a screeching halt, Roger’s practice closed to help stop the spread of the virus, and I wondered if or when they would be able to finish the order and ship them.
During that time I had an exciting opportunity to create floating built-in shelves on the landing of our second floor, which you can see here.
This gave us some good experience and checked off 1 of the 3 places I was hoping to create built-ins in our home.
I was so excited when I found out that the base cabinets would be arriving a little over a week before Roger would be going back to work.
So we were able to use Roger’s 8th week at home to build our living room built-ins.
And it was definitely time well spent!
Photo Details:
Woven Basket | White & Gray Ceramic Pot | Large Distressed Terra Cotta Candle Holder | Small Distressed Terra Cotta Candle Holder | Large Champagne Frame | Small Champaign Frame | Whitewashed Candle Holders | Large Ceramic Pot | World War II Illustrated Book | Secrets of Paris | Black Float Picture Frame |Eucalyptus Stems | Faux Ranunculus Stem | Woven Striped Pillows | Sofa | Large Rug
We went from having 0 of the 3 built-ins completed at the beginning of the year to somehow having 2 out of the 3 completed halfway through the year!
Now all that we have left are my office built-ins.
But we will save that for another time.
For now, we are going to relax in our updated living room enjoying these new custom details in our home.
And even though I just finished decorating them for the summer, I can’t wait to redecorate for fall and Christmas!
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With love, Giusti
Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them?” declares the Lord. “Do not I fill heaven and earth?” declares the Lord.
Jeremiah 23:24 NIV
