Finished Project {Mostly}

The bookcase is done! At least, it is mostly done. I keep moving things around, trying to figure out how to make it look pretty. Funny how having too much space {for the time being} can be a decorating issue just like having too little. I have certain shelves reserved because I know that we will be needing them. For instance, we will be studying geography every single year for the next seventeen years. That is, potentially, a lot of geography books. But, for now, we have three books on that shelf.

So I am learning how to make a half-empty shelf look nice. It’s a lot of fun! I don’t remember a time when I could put something decorative, or even arrange books decoratively, on a bookshelf–there was never any room. So I’m experimenting.

I thought this project would take me three or four days. I had forgotten the power of the old saying many hands make light work. Many hands, indeed! I don’t think my husband had to lift as much as a finger. The children were rushing books in from all corners of the house faster than I could put them on shelves. My son, after having been instructed in the basic divisions of his own collection {the difference between a juvenile biography and a juvenile history book, for instance} organized many of the bottom shelves while I did the top shelves.

And then there were a number of books sent to my bedroom. For instance, marriage books that the children don’t need to be reading, or certain fiction titles that I am not ready to part with, but I don’t want to risk exposing to small eyes {like Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five}. I thought I’d have to carry everything myself back to the back room, piles of photo albums and all, but the children were as excited as I was, and they carried everything, again, faster than I could shelve it.

In all, we had fun! And we are all enjoying this. Especially my husband and I. This is only the second piece of “real” furniture we’ve purchased in our marriage, and we feel like children who just bought a big toy.

Okay, so on with the photos! It is difficult for me to take photos of this area of my house. Our entry way is really, really wide, and sort of like a hallway in that it is long and leads into the great room. When we first looked at this house, I knew that it’d be the perfect “library” for our family. It was so wide that we could put shelves along one side, a narrow bench along the other, and still have plenty of room for guests to pass through.

However, it is not so wide that photos are easily accomplished, so I took two–a view of the left and a view of the right.

The collective space here is a whopping total of seven feet tall and twelve feet long.

Here is a closeup of my favorite shelf, our philosophy shelf, complete with a plate someone gave us depicting King Solomon’s famous decision decision:

One of my “issues” with children’s books has been dealing with their small size. This seems to lend itself to clutter. Now that we finally had some options, we went to a dollar store near our house and acquired a couple plastic baskets to keep all of the board books in. I’m actually planning on getting one more, now that I see how many we have. We placed them on a low shelf in the play nook, and little O. has spent more time with them this week than ever before!

Okay. One project down, two more to finish up. Anyone else working on anything fun and big?