Decorating Bookshelves with 3D Wooden Puzzle Kits
Decorating bookshelves needn’t be a chore. Turn it into an activity with exquisite 3D wooden puzzle kits. There’s several types that are colorful, charming, and can be assembled in hours. Each can beautify a bookshelf on its own, or be combined for a charm offensive in bookcases.
Once assembled, your bookshelves can have mini magical worlds sandwiched between your books, decorative bookends at either end and imaginative reading rooms or areas brought to reality in cute little dreamscape rooms, complete with lights to add to the ambience of the display. The best part - every kit is a memorable project and will have a story behind it. When you have guests visiting, these turn book displays into focal points that become conversation starters. What stories will your bookshelves tell?
Discover the Types of 3D Wooden Puzzle Kits for Personalizing Your Bookshelf Decor
DIY Book Nook Kits
DIY book nook kits are the bookshelf inserts of 3D puzzling. These are the kits that look like books without a binder. In its place is a miniature scene. They have a base, two side panels, and a roof and inside them is a miniature diorama of anything you can imagine. As a DIY kit project, the puzzles are usually pre-painted, packaged as a flat pack of boards with tiny laser-cut wood pieces, and your job is to assemble the scene using the instructions included. Many are one-sit kits that can be completed in 6 to 8 hours, with more complex kits taking upwards of 20 hours. There’s a massive range of designs.
Assembling DIY book nook kits is fidgety, yet amazingly therapeutic, and demands your full focus. When anything can do that, you can lose track of time because your attention is devoted to where pieces go, and occasionally stepping back and watching in awe as you begin to see a new world emerge before your eyes. It’s the distraction many of us need to take our minds off work, or whatever drama is unfolding on our smartphones. These are the types of tech-free activities to unwind with, or even completely switch off with a digital detox.
For bookshelf decorating, some of the best book nook kits are based on genres you read like fantasy-themed book nook kits, or an entire collection of Harry Potter book nook kits - one of every room in Hogwarts House.
For personalizing bookshelf displays though, you can’t beat a book nook kit theme that you can relate to. As examples, if a trip to Japan is on your top places to visit list, build a Tokyo Alley book nook kit. If you dream of having a summer house as a reading nook, build a garden house book nook kit (#8 on our list of book nook kits under $100).
DIY Bookends
DIY Bookends are like the BOGOF (buy one get one free) of 3D puzzles. You get two for the price of one because being bookends, you need two. One on the left of the shelf, the other on the right. However, seeing as these are miniatures, you don’t need to have them on either side of a shelf. Given the small size, they can form just part of a shelf letting you mix things up.
Instead of having a row of books on display, a part could be partitioned to keep a game card collection - Uno, Monopoly Deal, Sushi Go, Sprawlopolis, and Fantasy Realms. The type of games you can display on a small part of a bookshelf between DIY bookends, ready to pack and go for games to play on an RV vacation, or a backpacking trip. Use them as functional bookshelf decor pieces.
A few DIY bookend kits are ‘Farewell to the Night’, and ‘Fairy Town’ by Cutebee and the ‘Century Train’ DIY bookend set by Rolife. These aren’t as popular as DIY book nook kits, but there is still enough variety to make it easy to use these for seasonal redecorating of bookshelves. Like swapping out any of the earlier mentioned kits for something like the 'Christmas Cottage' bookend kit.
It’s an easy way to add a festive touch to your book display and one that’s much more creative and unique than having tinsel or fairy lights strung from a shelf. (Not that there’s anything wrong with those).
Miniature Dollhouses
Miniature dollhouses are the castles of the 3D puzzling world. Book nook kit hobbyists (those who have built several kits) can find that with experience, many of the beginner book nook kits can be assembled in an afternoon. The DIY miniature dollhouse kits are the progression to a more challenging kit, and with more options for customizing the kit for personalization.
The vast majority of miniature dollhouse kits are made to scale, unlike book nook kits and bookends. The ones that can be used for decorating bookshelves tend to be 1:24 and 1:48 scale. Within those scales, there’s a plethora of customizations that can be done, from adding scale miniature dolls, pets, figurines, sofas, floor panels, and even customizing the lighting.
3D Wooden Puzzles and Mechanical Puzzles
3D wooden puzzles are static designs, whereas mechanical puzzles have gears like hand cranks that make them interactive. Both can play a creative role in decorating bookshelves by adding contrast. Instead of everything being rectangular, or square, you can make things more interesting with thematic decor pieces.
On a shelf with a Japanese-themed book nook kit, a Sakura Bonsai 3D wooden puzzle could compliment it. Likewise, international travel lovers could have shelves of photo albums and memorabilia that could be complimented with a 3D puzzle of the Eiffel Tower. For the star-gazers, a monocular telescope could be the focal point of interest, or if your shelves have VHS or DVD collections on display, add in a vitascope movie projector to make it obvious that it’s a collection of old movies.
Embrace the Process of Decorating Bookshelves with 3D Puzzle Kits
Whether kits are handmade or assembled by hand makes no difference. It’s the process that matters. Putting the kits together is a memorable experience and it’s the memories that matter. Not just the kits, but the moments they represent. The times spent on vacation, the people you were with, the places you visited once upon a time, and the things that interest you, be that violins, cars, trains, or star-gazing expressed with a miniature telescope on your shelf.
With such unique designs breaking the monotony of ‘just books’, miniature 3D puzzles add character to bookshelves, and with many of the kits including LED lights, the soft lighting makes them even more mesmerizing when the lights go down in the evening. Perfect for cozying up under a reading lamp to snuggle in with your latest read.