We love books in our house. My mother-in-law and my brother-in-law are both librarians. My husband is a huge reader and we have tried to spark the same interest in reading in our kids. I started collecting books for our boys before they were even born. Our collection includes new books, used books and “out-of-circulation” library books. With all of these books, we needed an inexpensive solution to house all of our books. I found a cheap shelf and turned it into a book shelf by adding DIY bookends. 
When the boys were little we had clear card display shelves. They were great for holding books and they looked adorable because you could see the cover of each book. They were also basically “no assembly required”, so super low-maintenance!
Again, this was a fantastic solution when the boys were little. Then they pulled them off of the wall. And broke them. Because they are the kind of boys who pull things off of the wall, jump off of furniture, throw toys down the stairs all within a two-minute time span.
I happened to stumble upon a simple, inexpensive white shelf that we had bought a while back. The shelf looked like it would work well, but I would need bookends to keep the books from falling off the ends of the shelf.
DIY Bookends
I rummaged through my father-in-law’s scrap wood and found two pieces of wood to use as book ends. I screwed the wood on the end of the shelf, using three 2 ½ inch screws for each bookend.
To make the wood look less like bookends and more like books, I glued two book covers onto the wood to make them look like actual books.
This was a simple way to take an inexpensive shelf and make DIY bookends. I think the book shelf turned out great and it works well in our boys’ playroom dinning room.
