Building a {Home} Library

“I can never get a cup of tea large enough
or a book long enough to suit me.”
-C.S. Lewis

We LOOOOOOOOOVE books here at our house.

I mean … love!

When a used book sale is on the calender, we’re all counting down the days with high anticipation!

After hitting two homeschooling book sales in the past few weeks, the bookshelves in our home were overflowing.
A beautiful sight – but also really annoying and messy. I literally had books doubled up row by row on one bookshelf.

Now, we have this little room attached to the girls’ room (which they all share) that has been labelled a “playroom” (I have always disliked this name – and I do not like the idea that a whole room would be devoted to toys?! Insanity! We also don’t like that overloading feel of so many toys …. yuck) and a “nursery” but it really was neither. Just an extra room that we used for the girls. We’ve always talked about having our own library room but the thought of building built-in bookshelves was utterly daunting.

So while staring at the cluttered bookshelves in three different rooms, I decided to bring a majority of the books into this extra room to create a home library.
Dragging up two completely ugly laminate bookshelves from the basement was no easy task, but I was hoping with a little elbow grease, we could add the bookshelves to our upstairs library room.

This is what the bookshelves looked like when I started:

He added trim down the middle to connect the two bookshelves together.}

Not all the books are in the room yet, but this is far as I was able to get organized.

{This was taken with a wide angle lens so the room appears bigger than it really is but this was the only way to fit the room in my lens.}

{I’d like to put up feature books every now and then…}

I still have four more bookshelves on the main floor but this is what I manage to do so far.
My plan will be to swap out last year’s homeschool books and
put them in the library as I am ready to put out the next school year’s books.

Here is a {free} bookshelf I dragged in from an old barn and painted. It’s solid wood and perfect height for little ones’ book collection.

A darling, pretty piece of fabric was found at a local thrift store – I was thinking it would make a cute cushion cover for the rocking chairs in the Library.

I’m pleased to see extra room on the shelves – which means, more books may be added!

It is nice to have a majority of the girls’ books in one area as it helps me feel a bit more organized for school and less scattered.
We have also arranged them on the shelf according to subject, etc. I know that won’t last long but it was fun seeing how many books were in the science section, the animal and wildlife, history area and so forth.

We have so many wonderful classics that I could never bear to give away or toss away such great books, even if we have already read them.

How do you manage all your books? If you homeschool, do you keep your books or give away when your children are finished reading them?