TGIF #4

TGIF is hosted by the awesome Ginger at GReads

This Friday’s Question:

Bookshelf Tour: Where do you keep your books at home? Are they organized?

When I was in high school and living at home my bookshelves were incredibly organized, but once I went away to college that all fell apart. For one thing, my family would often go into my room and look through them, either because my little brother needed to read some book for school and my parents were pretty sure I already owned it (they were usually right), or because someone was bored and wanted to find a book to read for fun. I’m pretty protective of my books, so I would always wince when my mom told me she’d been going through my shelves, and by the end of the four years, everything was pretty much moved around. This was added to by the fact that I would continue to get books sent to me at home, which would then just get put haphazardly on a shelf somewhere by my mom.

These days I’m not living at home permanently, so I can’t bring myself to devote the time and effort it would take to reorganize everything when I know that sometime in the near future I’ll most likely be packing everything up and moving away with it anyway. But my shelves are organized in the sense that I pretty much know where everything is, and can usually find any book I’m looking for within a reasonable amount of time.

I definitely need more bookshelves though. As you might be able to tell from the picture below, every single shelf is double shelved, with two rows of vertical books and then two rows of horizontal books on top of them. I've also double-rowed the very top of the bookshelf, along with a precarious pile at the end. So these bookshelves are probably holding at least three times the number of books they were meant to. I’m honestly surprised they haven’t collapsed yet.

I also have a smaller bookshelf that I brought home with me from college, but that’s not organized either (and is also double shelved). It mainly consists of random books that I acquired while at school. I use its top shelf for my ridiculously large collection of books that I’ve checked out from the library (I have a problem with checking way too many books out, as I’m sure you can see), as well as books that I’ve read recently that I still need to write reviews for.

I usually also have random piles of books around my room, particularly right next to my bed. My room usually looks like a bookstore exploded in it, which is how I like it. :)

I cannot wait to have my own place and be able to organize all my books the way I want. I’m already collecting ideas on how to display everything. Here are a few amazing ones I’ve found:

A bookshelf chair! You can get any book you want without having to get up!

A bookshelf door! Although I hope there's something to keep the books from falling off when you open it:

Bookshelf staircase! I think this is so cool, but my one concern would be scuffs getting on the books from people carelessly running up the stairs.

And my favorite, bookshelf men! I especially like the one on the left:

Happy Friday everyone!