Chris and I love to read! And because of that we have soo many books…
For the first few years in our home I stored our books in various locations on various shelves we both had. Some were stored in our bedroom some in the basement and some in our living room.
Then we created our future nursery and with that came all of mine and Chris’ books from childhood. We had a proper home for those kids books that wasn’t in a plastic bin.
We also turned our basement living area into a home movie theater fit with a popcorn machine, mini fridge and candy cart. This had my mind whirring with ideas. In preparing our hearts, minds and spirits for becoming parents, something important to me is having a home that has rooms with specific functions and makes sense to any who enter home. If you’ve read my older Project/Cleaning posts you know I don’t like things sitting in my house without a home. So having our books located in many different places just didn’t make sense to me.
I wanted a central dedicated home library where all could come to grab a book to read and have a quiet space to do so. We didn’t have a true need for our second television. In a world where one can stream shows and movies from phones and tablets we knew the second television could go. At least for now… the long term dream would be to have the Samsung Frame TV mounted above our fireplace, but one thing at a time…
The most obvious thing we needed for our library was bookshelves! We ordered the BILLY shelves from IKEA, assembled them and began the organizing process.
How does one organize a home library, you may ask? Well there’s no one right way but the way my mind works is to organize based on category and then alphabetize the books within each category.
Our more "Adult" Themed shelf... the big tall one... has classics at the top, marriage and family devotionals, young adult and fantasy.
Our non picture books + non young adult books are few at the moment, so on our first smaller shelf we have the fantasy section finished out, health books ( food, home, finances, mental), then the bottom shelves are home to our children's chapter books.
To organize the books for littles, which took up it's own shelving unit, I like the rainbow method. It's way easier to teach kiddos about the order of the rainbow than it is to teach them about alphabetical order! They do a great job of matching the color of their book to the color coded section, and it looks so inviting. I also added a small basket of soft toys to encourage alternate quiet activities. This room is also home to a few board games and our puzzles, so placing a kid friendly option was the cherry on top.
I love how this all turned out. It will be exciting to see how our library changes and grows throughout the years, for now I am enjoying the cozy atmosphere and can't wait to do all my reading in our new library.
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