(Re)Construction: Bookshelf

I am a book hoarder. One of those people who, with good intentions of clearing up some clutter, takes a bag of books to the used book store, only to walk out with twice as many as I came in with. Needless to say, all these books require storage space, and so roughly half of my furniture was either intended to house books or has been repurposed for that use. So when Mom said I could have the bookshelves that currently hold my parents' VHS collection, I was extremely excited. There was only one problem. They looked like this:

Which doesn't, exactly, suit my style. So, three coats of a white paint later, it looked like this:

Which was much prettier, but somewhat boring. So, after trolling some of the crafting blogs (This post at Twice Lovely, to be exact), I decided I wanted to do a little damask detail up the sides. So I made myself a stencil

and did a few repeats on each side of my bookshelf in a slightly yellower white. It's so subtle it's difficult to photograph, but it looks a little something like this:

3 repeats up both sides, and one in the center of the top. It turned out exactly like I wanted, and I couldn't be happier.