From Old Lady's Dining Room to Young Lady's Dream Library

Our house -- a light-filled, retro, vaulted-ceilinged number -- is really unique. My husband and I love it so much, and I can't believe I'm living in such an incredible house at my age (I'm in my early twenties, and all of my friends live in apartments or their parents' houses). My husband is almost thirty, so he should have been living in a house earlier than this. I'm joking, honey, I love you! Don't keel me! I'll post a tour of the house at a later date, but right now I want to show you my dining room to library makeover. I'll even include the shelf redo, so this is going to be a little lengthier than normal. This is a picture of the dining room before it was ours.

Cute, right? Riiight. Well I wanted a library, and I didn't want this room to just be a blank hole since we didn't really need a dining room. But for weeks I just didn't know what kind of colors I wanted in here. I finally saw this picture online:

I loved it instantly. The teal-green color just pops, doesn't it? I decided that I could substitute book pages for those leather patches and seal them with polyurethane to give them that coloring, and I'd make shelves in a similar teal color. And that's what I did.

My lovely mother, who helped me paste and seal the pages, took that picture from the floor. That's me, finishing the last wall. I think I worked slower than she did because I was reading the pages as I was putting them on the wall. I read a lot, and one of the consequences of being an avid reader is that your books get really beaten up after you read them a few (thousand) times. We only used pages from the books that I'd read so many times that they no longer had spines or covers. Here's a picture of my reading nook before I put in the table I just redid.

I made that pillow in high school out of old blue jeans. And yes, that is a picture holder propping up that book and keeping my place for me. Now I'm going to show you what I did with the shelves. My husband and I are on a tight budget because we are young and this is our first house. So I once again got some inspiration from the internet. I saw this picture, and I knew what I had to do.

Drawers? As shelving?! I'll take it!

I had an old, decaying chest of drawers, and they just happened to be deep enough to hold books. I painted them teal on the outsides and papered the insides with the same pages that I papered the library with. My darling husband then hung them on the wall. Just add books, and voila!

Beautiful, unique shelving. They don't hold all of my books, so I'm still combing craigslist for free dressers. Or do you think I should do something else? I'll try anything, seriously.