My house is rather small.
Approximately 1,800 square feet.
We have over 2,200 books in our house.
Do you want to see where we keep the books?
Last summer my parents built these book shelves/cupboards for us in our front room. This is where we keep our "pretty" books. They are mostly religious, historical or classics. And most of them belong to Utah Dad.
Only months after moving into our home nearly 7 years ago, my dad helped us build the bookshelves/desk I designed in our upstairs loft. It currently needs some repairs but has served us well. This is where I keep my books that I've already read. It's also where I work on the computer, so I spend a lot of time right here.
On the bottom shelf we keep a lot of the books for the kids. I've collected many of these at used book sales at libraries. There is a second layer of books behind the first on these deep shelves.
The girls have this shelf in their room that is rapidly filling with Amberly's novels. They also have a shelf in their closet that has lots of picture books and board books that belong to the younger girls but their closet is messy and I didn't take a picture.
Along one wall in our master bedroom we added these cheap Walmart shelves and quickly filled them to overflowing. Besides the encyclopedia (why do we still have it?) and the years of National Geographic magazines, this is where I collect the books I still plan to read.
This smaller bookshelf is also in our bedroom near my side of the bed. It is filled with the books that my friend recently gave me before she moved out of the country. I plan to read them--eventually.
Someday we will have a house with a library and all the books can be in one room. This is my dream. Until then, we'll keep figuring out spaces for the books I just can't help collecting.
This is great! I love seeing pictures of other people's bookshelves. We have a bunch of bookcases at one end of our guest room, and I'd love to get rid of them and have some floor to ceiling shelves built along the whole wall.
ReplyDeleteAnd I love the idea of having a library, but I remember that growing up we had full bookcases in every room in the house, and I just loved how that looked.
And you can't get rid of the encyclopedias! I know we've got the internet now and all, but I have such great memories of looking through the encyclopedias when I was a kid. I just loved them. maybe one of your kids will want them when they move out?
The shelves you built are absolutely beautiful! I love all of this and I, too, will have a library some day. Complete with sliding ladders.
ReplyDeleteThis is fabulous! Yay books! One of my dreams is to have a library with shelves that need one of those rolling ladders. *sigh*
ReplyDeleteHow on earth do you get your children's books to look so neat!?!?! OUrs ALWAYS look a disaster :)
ReplyDeleteWow! I can't bear to part with books either. Over the years we have collected bookshelf after bookshelf. We have 17 bookcases in our home that are all filled to capacity. Teach has most of hers all boxed up and Bossy, Drama Queen and Gym Rat took theirs when they moved out. I did finally get rid of some of our old textbooks from college. Literally thousands of books...
ReplyDeleteSandy