I’ve had said for a long time that I want to work on organizing my house more and making my space feel more like me. There are a lot of projects that I could do to accomplish that, but it’s overwhelming to think about everything I could do. I think because of that, I have avoided doing any of them. But I have had a feeling of needing to change things up for a long time.
I’ve slowly been making changing in my house to have nicer things or to make what I have work better for me. A lot of the changes are about getting rid of things that I might not need anymore. I’ve been selling things that I don’t use anymore to have a little extra money, but it’s not about raising money. But making $10 or $20 off of something I would just get rid of is nice. And there are a few things that I’d like to buy to add to the organization of my house that I could put that money toward.
But it’s always nice when I find something that costs nothing that makes my house feel so much more like me.
The bookcase I have in my room isn’t anything special. I think I bought it at Target or Staples and I know I bought it when I got my first apartment. So I’ve had it for over 16 years. It’s been with me in 3 different homes and it’s been in a few different places in my current house. I don’t love the bookcase, but it does the job and I haven’t felt motivated to get something new nor have I found one that I really want to get. I don’t want to replace it until I find something that I know will add to my space.
But the bookcase serves its purpose. I don’t have a ton of books, but I need to be able to store them and keep things organized. And for as long as I can remember, my books were organized in the same way. The very top shelf had my etiquette books and other types of self-improvement type books (more about style than improving my life, but still self-improvement). The very bottom shelf had all of my acting books. And the middle shelves had my other books. And each section was organized in alphabetical order. I figured that made sense and just went with it.
I couldn’t find a good picture of what my bookcase looked like before, but I did find this photo where you can see it a bit and it gives an idea of how I had things set up.
But even though this organizational method made sense, I didn’t like the look of it. I would love to have a library of beautiful books and have my bookcase look fancy. And the way that I had my books just looked too functional when it didn’t need to be that way. So from time to time, I would look at things online about how to organize a bookcase. I never really thought any of those ideas would work, but I still wanted to make a change.
For some reason, this past Monday I was struck with the need to change my bookcase. I figured I could try different organizational ideas and see which ones I liked. I didn’t think I would just work on it and be done with it, but I knew I needed to just start and go from there. So the first thing I did was take every single book off of my bookcase. And when doing that, I found a few books that I realized I don’t need anymore. I don’t think I got rid of any of my fiction books, but there were several acting and self-improvement books that were either outdated or that I hadn’t looked at once since I moved into my current house. All of those books went into a bad to donate (I didn’t want to sell them since donating them to the library or other places is better).
Once I got rid of some books, I started working on the first idea about how to organize a bookcase: organizing the books by color. I picked this first because I was so sure that I would hate it. Organizing books by color didn’t keep books together in a way that made sense. I still wanted to have some separation between my fiction and non-fiction books and if I just did all of the books of the same color together, that wouldn’t accomplish that. But I started to make piles around my room and found that I could still keep those 2 types of books separate even when I split them up by color.
I worked on putting the books back after making the piles, and I didn’t put them all upright. I did some of the books on the side which ended up making more room on my bookcase. And once I had the books in a place that worked, I added a few other things from around my house to fill in the empty space. And once I did that, I took a step back and realized that the idea that I thought I would hate ended up being exactly what I wanted to do.
It’s silly how my room feels so much more complete somehow just by moving around a few books. I didn’t make a huge change and almost everything is still in about the same place as they were before. But that small change put things into exactly where they should be and created the look that I didn’t know I wanted to find.
So many organizational projects require supplies or buying something to complete it. It’s nice when I can find something that is completely free and still makes me feel like I splurged on something!
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More Empty Space In My House (The Cleaning And Organizing Continues)
