Faking Custom Built Ins

In my opinion, it is always a great experience to walk through a beautiful home and admire the architectural features it contains. One of my favorite architectural features in a home is built-in shelving and cabinets. There’s just something to be said about custom units that fit perfectly into a corner of your home, add beautiful aesthetic appeal and help to keep you and your family organized.

Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to find an attractive feature like custom built-in shelving in a rental house or apartment home. If you’ve got a custom unit like this in your rental home, you’re lucky! Custom built-ins are also not likely a feature that you, as a tenant, would invest a lot of time and money in to add to your rental home only to have to leave it behind once you move on. Do you know what you can do as a renter? Fake it. Yes, I said fake it! It’s time to take your rental home into your own hands and add a temporary, fake set of custom built-ins. The key is to create a shelving unit that looks like it’s attached to the wall permanently but that can easily be moved if you leave the rental home. Start with a basic bookshelf or shelving unit from your local home décor store. A great piece to start with is one like this Ikea shelf I have in my living room.

Frame your basic book shelf with molding (such as crown molding, chair molding, etc.) which you can find at your local hardware store. Add the molding to your piece and then fill in any gaps with caulk. Prime the entire piece and then paint the whole thing one color so that it looks like one consistent piece. You could also add your own custom paper backing (simply use adhesive spray glue to add pretty wrapping or scrapbook paper to the back side of the bookshelf!), special knobs or drawer pulls to make the piece look even more custom. This post from Centsational Girl shares a great step-by-step photo tutorial if you’d like more information on the how-to process of adding trim to a basic piece of furniture. I actually completed this process my previous home’s master bathroom renovation. While this was not a rental home and this piece (because it was plumbed into the wall) was not moveable, this shows you just how great a basic piece of furniture, like the builder-grade cabinetry I used, can look with the simple addition of trim, paint and custom knobs.

If you’re not up for the task of constructing furniture with trim or molding, try a simpler approach to faking custom built-ins by adding floating shelves. I used a set of simple floating shelves to add some dimension to a corner wall in my son’s nursery.

In order to achieve a fake built-in look, use your floating shelves to flank another piece of furniture, such as a television, bed or fireplace mantel. Because floating shelves are relatively low-maintenance and versatile, you can use them to customize any particular space! You could also use curtains to flank furniture on either side, hiding shelving and creating a custom temporary nook like they did here on Young House Love.

All in all, there are a few different ways to fake a custom built-in shelving unit in your rental dwelling. Whether you choose to adorn a large, basic piece with molding, flank a piece of furniture with floating shelves or add curtains to a nook in your house, these temporary options will all create an extra air of architectural sophistication in your rental or apartment home!