This is my bookshelf. Well, one of my bookshelves. I'm quite the book lover, so I have a couple of them. But this is where I keep my most favorite books. It looks a little nicer than usual because we're painting the basement and we just repainted this from yucky yellow-y off-white to a plain white. But this is basically how my bookshelf looks most of the time.

Because I love my books, I love an organized bookshelf. I have my books very carefully organized by type, by author, and even by size. The middle section is all books by my favorite Science Fiction author Anne McCaffrey, so that's why the shelves are double stacked, to fit them all in this section together. Up top are is Time-Life book collection and some of my mother's books.

The bottom shelves are my other Science Fiction paperbacks, all organized by size and by author. Yes, I know it's a little overkill, but it's worth it when I reach over and find exactly the book I want. And I get a big charge from seeing them all lined up and looking pretty. Yes, I know there's a bit of a gap there - my son's girlfriend and I are re-reading the Twilight series (again!), so there are a couple of books out there.


From an organizational point of view, I did make one mistake. I didn't leave any room for expansion. You always want to leave a little extra space for the new books you know you are going to buy. When I rearrange my other shelf, I'm hoping I'll have some more room on that one and I can shift a few over.

Yes I know I could declutter some of them, but I got rid of two big boxes just before we moved last year, so I'm mostly down to the ones I really love. If worse comes to worst and I don't find any extra room in the other shelf, I might be inclined to prune my movie shelf and put a category of books over there.

That's one solution when you're really stuck in the decluttering system. If you really can't prune in one particular category, you can always cut back in a different category to make the extra space.

So, here's your challenge - take a look at your bookshelf (or bookshelves) and see what you need to do with it. Do you need to add more shelves? Weed out some books? Do you have your books organized in some kind of system that makes sense to you or are they just piled in there in every which way? If not, now would be a good time to add some organization to your bookshelf.

Now, here's how you DON'T organize your bookshelf. For the love of little kittens, DO NOT take everything out of the bookshelf and dump it all on the floor!

I know I did, but that was only because we were painting the shelves. Your best bet is to start by clearing out just ONE shelf. Now pick a category such as business or self-help books. Comb through the rest of the shelves and find any and all books in this category and shift them all to the clear shelf. While you are sorting, weed out any books that can be decluttered - of course you have a box or two handy to deal with them. Now smoosh the remaining books around to fill up the empty gaps, which will create some space for the next category.

By doing it this way, you can do the change in small increments, a little bit at a time if need be. Even if you need to set it aside for a day or even a week, you can do so without having a huge mess to make you feel terrible about your area. And when you complete the task, take a picture so you will remember exactly how it looks and feels when it is organized.

Be sure and come back every Monday for my Clutterbugs series. If you'd like to read some of the previous posts, just click on the Clutterbugs tag at the bottom of this post and it will bring up a complete list.



By TwitterButtons.com