Home Libraries

Oi. Our vast array of books, binders and manuals took up a chunk of moving space. Not just for me and Brent! The girls have an impressive collection of children's books as well. Our Boston apartment came with shelves. Our Chicago apartment not only comes sans shelves, but we are extremely limited on space. Extremely. Brent and I knew we'd have to get creative because leaving all our books in boxes was not an option. Here's what we came up with:

After hanging their clothes, I realized the bottom half of the girls' closet was empty. It occurred to me we could fit a small bookcase in there. Pottery Barn Kids just happened to have a bookshelf that fit the measurements perfectly! They also had these lovely canvas buckets (washable *choirs of angels*) which could be personalized.

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm a sucker for anything that can be personalized. Growing up with an unusual name, I loved that I was unique but I still felt I missed out. The little key chain kiosk at the gas stations never had my name. Not that I would have bought the stupid key chain, but the lack of my name being there I felt negated my very existence! With my own girls, I want them to have the unique name experience, but without the key chain kiosk pain. Enter personalization! I have a bucket with my name on it, therefore I exist. My pie in the sky dream is for the girls to take them to college and use them for toiletries or something. We'll see.

Toys go into the buckets which can be carried to any room in the house. If Ireland is taking a nap, I can pull all of Liesel's toys into the family room. They make clean up so easy even Ireland knows how to put her things away. If I don't want the girls getting into their toys or the books I can just shut the closet doors. There were a number of books that hung over the edge of the shelf so I stacked those horizontally along the bottom. I've seen a trend of organizing books by color so I was excited to make a rainbow effect with them. It's so cheerful it makes me happy every time I open the closet.

For the grown up books, we scoured many furniture places. We didn't want to get something cheap that would fall apart in the next move. We also quickly discovered you can spend a fortune on bookshelves. Finally something within a reasonable price range that fit perfectly along a wall in our bedroom presented itself. Brent was skeptical that we'd use the triangle cut ends much but we actually use them the most. They're convenient for housing scriptures since you can just grab and go rather than pull them out from between other books. The unanticipated bonus is how nice our room is for preparing a talk or lesson for church. We have a whole gospel library at our fingertips! While we work, we can spread materials out on the bed. With the rest of the family at the other end of the apartment, it's incredibly peaceful and lends itself to contemplation.

Once we put the bookshelves up, we finally, FINALLY unpacked our books! I know they're a pain to move, but each one felt like an old friend: Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, Killer Angels, The Tipping Point, etc.. It was 2 in the morning when we finished putting them together but I couldn't stop adjusting the shelves and arranging books by topic, size and color. It was like an epiphany when I did the top shelf with tallest in the middle going down to smallest. I felt witty when I put the wedding scrapbook my MIL made for us, the guest sign-in from our reception and Pride and Prejudice on the same shelf. I noticed one shelf of similar sized books tended to be either burgundy or blue. Something clicked when I arranged them in a gradiated pattern. Forget a scented candle, I think the best housewarming gift is a good book.