Details in the Study — Invisible Bookends and How to Hang a Rug

Last week I shared the “finished” makeover of Sam’s study, which I’m pretty pleased with:

It was a collaborative effort, and in the end I think we ended up with a space that meets Sam’s needs and doesn’t look half bad! 🙂

As promised, I’m sharing “how-tos” this week for two of the small projects in the space: the rug wall hanging and the invisible book ends.

Rug wall hanging

We wanted to do something big and colorful for the blank wall behind the recliner, since the rest of the room is pretty sparse.

I immediately thought of the blue rug that I (or my mom…I can’t remember) bought in Mexico 10 years ago, which we’ve just had folded up on the back of the couch in the sunroom.

It’s a really thin woven rug so it doesn’t work that well on the floor (unless it’s layered over a larger rug), so it was pretty much destined to live on the wall.

To mount it, I wanted to find a nicer approach than just tacking it to the wall (which was what Sam wanted to do…). Instead, I thought that a dowel would work well, mounted to the wall using 3/4″ copper pipe hangers from Home Depot:

The dowel was also 3/4″, but when I got the pieces home I found that the opening on the copper pipe hangers was actually larger than 3/4″ despite the marked size — so the dowel wiggle around a lot. In addition, while a 3/4″ dowel seemed like it would be plenty strong to support the weight of the rug when I was comparing options at the store, when I got home I pretty quickly realized that the dowel was going to buckle under the weight.

I sulked around for a few minutes, and then remembered an unused curtain rod that the seller of our house left behind in the corner of a closet (I feel like I mentioned a different left-behind item in every single post…the seller of our home did a terrible job of moving out). It has decorative finials that I hate so I would never use to it to hang curtains, but I was able to just unscrew the finials to create a raw pipe essentially. Since the rug is draped over it, very little of it is visible so I just ignore the fact that the metals clash:

The rug is just doubled over the rod adjusted to the height we liked best, and then held in place with a safety pin on each side of the folder over.

The safety pin is invisible, even close up. Can you see it?

Easy peasy, and we can always adjust the height down the road if we want!

Invisible bookends

I knew that I needed bookends on the shelves since they’re actually completely full of books rather than “gathered objects,” but I didn’t want to spend much money or do anything that felt like a statement in and of itself.

I was google around for bookend ideas, and came across an idea on A Beautiful Mess for invisible bookends:

Inspirational! However, their method involved replacing all the pages of the book with a wooden block.

To be honest I don’t really understand why, and I’m both lazy and didn’t want to actually destroy my books. So instead I followed my own rather complex process.

Step 1: Order generic bookends from the internet. I used some inexpensive metal ones that I found for $8.90 for a pair on Amazon (affiliate link – read our policies). They come in lots of colors, so choose a cool color in case you ever decide to make your bookends un-insvisibile (er, visible).

Step 2: Pick a book. You don’t need to destroy it, so it can be any book.

Step 3: Tuck bookend inside back cover of book.

Step 4: Put book back on shelf. (Though this is sooo easy and reversible that if you accidentally put the bracket facing the wrong way like I did in the photo above, you can just change it. It takes like 3 seconds.)

This works whether your book of choice is a nerdy fantasy novel, or a nerdy management novel.

Wow, all these books are super dorky, now that I really look at them. Philosophy, British history, grammar jokes, the Marx-Engels Reader, statistics…can you tell that we were popular in high school?

So there you have it, two really easy “projects” from the study. Oh also, I said goodbye to this amazing switchplate:

I went crazy buying new white switchplates for $.99 each, which now I need to get around to installing throughout the house. Adding that to my never-ending to-do list….

(Sharing at Create Link Inspire and Link Party Palooza)