One of the first things we did when we moved into this house was buying Ikea Billy shelves and glass doors for the formal living room turned library. Six years later, it’s one of the few things I’ve never been tempted to change.

Aesthetically, I still love how they look and how they’re one of the first things you see when you come in the house. It’s a very bright room, and the white with glass works really well in there. When we were first putting them, we considered adding molding to them for a more built-in look, but I’m very glad we went with the glass instead: way easier than adding molding and more practical in the battle against dust.

And they’ve held up remarkably well given the heavy burden of books we expect them to withstand.

So thumbs up on Billy shelves; good job, Ikea!

The nice thing about the glass doors is that the shelves always looked fairly tidy. It was easy to glance at the shelves and assume the books were neatly organized, and that I’d be able to find whichever one I was looking for in short order. But the shelves had a dark secret: the books were not carefully organized by category or alphabetized at all!

Well, almost not at all. When I first put them the books in there, there was some vague categorizing going on, but it evaporated pretty quickly. And then Ari volunteered to organize them awhile back, but he quickly got overwhelmed and gave up. (I figured out why when he was helping me organize on this go round. He kept asking me things like, “so if I have two books about the same thing, should I organize them by author or by date of publication?” And I had to keep explaining that this isn’t the Library of Congress and I don’t care as long as I can find my books!)

Okay, so I finally did it! I pulled all the books out and I got them completely organized! Here’s how I did it, though, of course, your particular book organizing needs might be different.

Fiction (alphabetical by author)

Literary anthologies with more than one author, folktales and fairytales

History, broken into US and World History, organized basically chronologically

Religion

Essays, memoir, and biography

Science

Math

Homeschooling, Education, Rhetoric, Literary studies

General non-fiction (which is mostly parenting and gardening, it turns out)

Poetry

Drama

Fine Arts

Reference

Political science and philosophy

Travel

A bunch of Abe’s preschool stuff that I still need to organize somehow

So, you see, our categories are pretty specific to us and to homeschooling. Kids fiction goes upstairs in the shelves in the hallway. Only after I pulled all the kids’ fiction that wasn’t supposed to be there off the downstairs shelves, we realized we need more shelves upstairs. So that’s another project. There’s always another project.

Right now my stairs look like this, because I haven’t managed to even get all the kids books upstairs yet:

So I’m very happy that this is done now (you know, except for the piles of kid books all over my house), and now the only thing to do is to keep them organized. I suppose I should try to make this post universal and helpful and all and not just about me and my books. So here are my handy tips for book organization:

Don’t give up! You can do it! I’ve looked at those shelves a million times and put off organizing them because it seemed totally overwhelming, and because I knew that I wouldn’t have be able to find a solid chunk of time to do it all at once and that it would mean my library would look like this for two weeks or so:

I actually enjoy sorting and organizing and alphabetizing; I find it soothing. But the whole living with piles of books everywhere thing did not appeal to me. But the way out is through, and it was worth it in the end.

Take this opportunity to get rid of books: My usual book purging method involves spending thirty seconds looking at a shelf and hoping something I don’t need anymore catches my eye. Pulling pretty much every single book off the shelf encourages a more ruthless approach. I’m still not very good at getting rid of books, but I did come up with two big boxes full to donate at least.

Once your books are all organized, consider cataloging them: I haven’t actually done this yet. But did you know that we’re living in such a technologically advanced age that you can download an app on your phone and scan all the barcodes from your books in just like you have a real library?! I downloaded Library Thing and immediately scanned every book I could reach from where I was sitting, and it was very satisfying. But I haven’t made it over to the shelves to do all the books yet. On one hand, I feel like being able to see that yes, I really do own that book I need and can’t find might just be frustrating, because, I mean….I still can’t find the book! But on the other hand, maybe now that my books are all nicely organized, I will be able to find them! Plus lots of my books aren’t in the library at all, but on shelves elsewhere because they have a second job of looking pretty:

 

While I’m still very pleased with the Billy shelves, I’m itching to make some changes soon to the library itself:

First of all, that Scottie really needs to go.

Just kidding. The Scottie stays.

But I do want to paint, probably white, and that will probably happen whenever we get around to painting the dining room (there have been some….developments that I’ll tell you about soon that might be pushing the dining room makeover down on the list).

I’ve been meaning to refinish that little coffee table for FOREVER, and it’s just inoffensive enough that I’ve never made it a priority and it’s still not done.

And the loveseat is the dogs’ very favorite hangout space and, as such, it’s in pretty rough shape. What I really want there is a grand piano. But I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon. So maybe a new couch and a couple of small chairs to make a better seating/reading area? I don’t know.