We’ve been eyeballing the approximately 16 inch space between our living room recliner slide and the kitchen slide for a while now and contemplating using the empty space for additional storage. Taking measurements and looking around, we found a nice cabinet – actually a bookshelf – at IKEA. The particular line is called “Billy”. It is 15 3/4″ wide and about 11 inches deep. Almost a perfect fit for the space we were looking at.

There were matching doors available, but all of them had glass in the top half or both halves of the door. If you bought the shorter bookshelf, you could get a solid wood door for it. We bought two of the shorter doors and they worked just fine with the taller bookcase.

Here is the space we were looking at.

Once the cabinet was assembled, we set it up on the kitchen floor to check height, etc. and generally fit it in the space. We knew we’d have to trim the corner of the living room slide molding. We also trimmed just a touch of the kitchen slide trim.

With the trim cut back a little, we had plenty of room on both sides of the cabinet for the slides to retract. Malcolm had purchased an extra 12″ x 36″ black shelving board at the home improvement store to make a base to set the cabinet on since it had to “hover” over the kitchen step.

With the support in place, we put the unit on top of it and ran a couple screws into the base to hold the unit in place. We also put a couple 3″ angle brackets on the top of the unit to hold it against the wall.

We mounted the doors on the unit. The hinge brackets for the bottom door had to be moved a little from the pre-drilled hole locations, so we drilled a couple new holes for each bracket and mounted everything up just fine. The middle shelf is fixed and that is where the two doors meet.

With the doors in place, we drilled holes for the door handles. We bought two nickel handles that matched the ones we put on all the other cabinets in the trailer a couple years ago. Fortunately, they were still available.

We were pleased with the result. We’ve started loading up the cabinet with items from around the kitchen. Since there is currently nothing holding the doors shut (for when we are moving), we’re going to add a couple of the magnetic child safety locks we’ve used on a few other cabinets in the trailer to keep the doors from opening in transit.

Costs for the project:

Billy Bookcase in Medium Brown from IKEA – $59.99

Two Oxberg medium brown doors from IKEA – $80.00

Black shelf board 10″ x 36″ – $6.98

Various sizes of corner braces – $10.74

Two nickel handles – $11.94

Total project cost – $183.65 with tax