34 Weeks of Clean - Week 9: Books

This week I've looked forward to working on our books.  I didn't get the shelf in the living room tackled, so I plan to dust it soon. 

Yesterday, I finally had a chance to get some time upstairs and work on the shelves in the gameroom.

Before

We didn't have to work on homeschool books, so I left those alone.  This is what the gameroom shelves looked like.  The shelf on the left hold the children's books and school materials.  The bottom three shelves were what we worked on straightening.  Kent volunteered to help me and he even said he was having fun while we were working.  We took all the children's books off the shelf, sorted them out by size/type and then we weeded through them and pulled out any doubles and torn-up books/magazines that needed to go in the trash.  Then I looked through the stacks and pulled all the books I didn't want to keep and Kent helped me put them back on the shelf the way they belong.  The shelf on the right is "Mommy's Library".  It holds the chapter books for kids.  They don't have a free for all on this shelf and are supposed to "check" the books out with me.  They are only allowed one or two at a time and they have to be checked back in before they can have another.  This system has been working pretty well to keep the books fairly organized and not all in a jumbled mess or lost all over the house.  The top shelf held activity boxes, which I was able to move downstairs into a buffet cabinet that wasn't being used for much.  Jeff installed some baby resistant locks to the doors so that they are only accessible when I get them out.  That left a whole shelf for us to put "new" books on.  I haven't unpacked all the books from our move three and a half years ago, because I don't have shelving for them all.  I was able to look through some of the books still stored and pull out several that I thought the older kids would enjoy reading.  Kent was quite excited to see several new books that he had never read before.  He likes to read and has already read pretty much everything we have out at least one time and some of them several times.

After

While I was looking for books to add to the library shelf I found the one cookbook I have been looking for since we moved.  I was excited and felt a little silly that it was in a box labeled cookbooks.  I thought I'd looked in that box, but obviously I hadn't.  I'm guessing that I had two boxes with cookbook labels and only ever looked in the one.  I found a few cookbooks that I didn't even remember having so I figured I would add them to the donate pile, since I hadn't missed them.

Books to give away/get rid of

Found!

I call this mission a success.










Next week's goal is the entryway.  Click the button on the left to get the details.