A Quick and Easy Fix For Unaligned Bookshelves (and Furniture)

I hope you’re having a wonderful week!  The BIG Room Makeover Giveaway has been huge. I hope you’ve had the chance to enter.  Can you imagine winning over $1500 in prizes to redecorate an enter room? – how exciting!

So this post is not a specific DIY-follow-along-with-every-step kinda post, but instead it’s more of I-hope-I-can-inspire-you-to-think-outside-the-box type.  Basically, you’re not going to have the same shelving or the same scenario as I, but hopefully with my show-and-tell you’ll be “pushed” (in a nice way of course) to fix something that’s been buggin’ you or somehow have an ah-ha moment.

Confused? nevermind – I’m in a silly mood, so let’s just begin.

So the famous (well in my nutty mind since they’ve been pinned over 135,000 times) painted laminate bookcases got moved once twenty-thirteen hit.  They’re in the same room (which I will be sharing soon), but instead of being separate as they once were, now they are together side-by-side.  And boy, do I love the look!

In my mind, I envisioned a built-in look once the bookcases were next to each other.  BUT, with any house and any piece of furniture, 99.9999% of the time there is some unevenness (ie: worn wood flooring, warped furniture, etc).  The result for me when the bookcases came together was that the bottom mouldings aligned perfectly (well almost), but the tops were really off.

See what I mean…

Here’s the fix.

Using my handy-dandy drill (love this tool)…

… and (1) flat head 2″ long screw with nut,

I drilled through the side of the ONE BOOKSHELF (not both).

I positioned the hole about 1″ away from the decorative front so you can’t see it.

Once I drilled through the side of the first bookcase, then I pulled the other one in position so the top moulding was perfectly aligned next to it.

THEN I drilled through the second bookcase side.  Once that was complete, which only took seconds to do, I put the screw through one side and tightened the nut on the other side.

Super Simple!

Literally, this took me from start to finish, 5 minutes max.

Once it was done, I had a few changes to make.

I have to be honest with you though, since I styled my bookshelves last year, not much has changed.  They still make me smile.  The change I made was I added two pictures to the face frame where the two bookshelves meet.

I added a nail and hung them up…

I’m so happy that the look of a library, with two cheap-o bookcases, has been created.  And this quick and easy fix of aligning the mouldings has helped tremendously.

When asked what kinds of projects you wanted to see in 2013 – You asked for easy DIYs, so I’m delivering!

 I hope I’ve inspired you to fix or update something that’s been bugging you!
What quick fixes do you hope to tackle in 2013?

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