Bookshelf cleanout

It gives me a lift just to see it looking orderly.

Before we started school this year, we had moved furniture around so that I could use both of my livingroom bookshelves for the school area. Everything had been moved into them, but I didn't really have a good system yet, and it wasn't organized. I had everything handy, it just didn't look right.

Monday I got some time to clean out the shelves and put things back nice and tidy. I started off with this:

Most of my shelves are adjustable. The shelf that is about 1/3 of the way up from the bottom is stationary, and it is very sturdy. That is a good place to put heavy, hardback books. The adjustable shelves are decent, but they are held up by little brass pegs, so they are fine for paperbacks and smaller books.

I do not have a system for classifying my books, really. That is why it works well for me to just arrange them by size. It really does look nicer that way. I just divided them up into heavy vs. lightweight books. The "grown-up" books are on the right side bookshelf, and the books we use for school are on the left side. It works out that most of the books I pull in and out during a regular day are on the same shelf.

I have found that it does look neater to pull all the books out to the front of the shelf, even if they are narrow and can be pushed back. That way the spines are all even. That is easier said than done, so I wait until I am putting things back at the end of the school day. That seems like a lot of trouble, but it is a little thing that makes a huge difference in the way the shelf looks.


Here is a picture of what it looked like three hours later. Three hours, but I didn't work on it the whole time, since I had a baby to take care of!


If you look closely at the lower right corner, you will see my little helper checking it out. Get out of there, you little mess!

There is one little part that needs to be finished. The kids DVDs and CDs are still out of order, and they might need to be moved. The DVDs are pretty secure from baby brother, but the CDs fall right out of the cases when he gets a hold of them!

Our school area is part of the kitchen, and it is very visible to the rest of the living area of the house. It gives me a lift just to see it looking orderly.