“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
– Cicero
One of the best words of advice in my motherhood and homeschooling journey was to build up your own home library.
In a world of every changing politics and morals and seeing history literally being erased or changed, a home-based library – filled to the brim with wonderful, solid living books is quite an asset to your family.
While going to the library was once a joy and a delightful outing many years ago, now, in this new day and age, I would be very hesitant to visit a library with my little ones, not knowing what books would be featured on the shelves.
If we could no longer go to the library, then the library should be brought to us.
And so …
Over the past 15 years, I have been building it up, buying books of all kinds – not just for light reading, but books we can learn from, study, use as a reference, gain knowledge and incorporate as our own personal homeschool library. You can find books on weather, birds of North America, science and medical history, language and poetry, great fiction and classics … it has been a treasure hunt to find some of the books, but it has been a great journey. Of course, I’m not finished building up the library yet – there are a few books, I’m sure, that I still need to locate! {This set, for example, is needed for my growing boys! I have had years of finding books for the girls in my family, but now with three young sons, my eyes are set on building up the boy library.}
Can one ever have too many books?! I don’t think so!
But the problem with so many books is … of course … storage!
We have four large bookshelves (floor to ceiling) already full in our house – but we still had books that were in storage from our move two years ago. Thinking about this issue, I envisioned a built in bookshelf in the little nook of a room that is just off our kitchen. It was just a random room, too small to be a big living area, but not needed for anything other than … well, a nook. I have called it The Little Library ever since we moved into this home, even though it only housed a few books for the smaller children, tucked away on a shelf I found stored in our barn when we moved.
One morning, I woke up with inspiration to clean out this room (which was filled with mismatched furniture and seemed to be a junky sort of room, in my opinion) and create a built in bookshelf and creating a cozy reading area.
With the help of my handy husband (ladies, always marry a man who can work around the house!) … and with some labour of love from my girls … we put together this lovely Lilac Library for home —and with a few weeks to spare … just in time to use it before the nice weather draws us all outdoors for the rest of the summer. Now, we have organized and set up the library to house all the books that were still in storage.
And yes, we painted it purple – as these two items were inspiration to us (a beautiful gift from a friend in Orangeville and a sweet little footstool I found in a local thrift store recently). I was hesitant to use purple as it is a colour that can go wrong, if you get the wrong shade! And it did go wrong – we had to tone down the purple quite a few times to find the shade that we liked.
But in the end, we were happy – a cozy, sweet nook of a library to cuddle up and read a book during stormy afternoons or for the upcoming winter and cooler months …
There’s an old ladder in our barn that I would like to use for our library ladder – I just need to find the hardware for it to be a rolling ladder … because that certainly would be more fun to reach those tops shelves with a darling rolling library ladder!
Ladies, keep working on your homes — making it cozy and inviting, a place that is special for you and your children … and keep building up the library on your shelves. It will be worth it.
P.S. This is a lovely jar of antique marbles, given to my boys from a new friend we have made. The gentleman gave the boys the marbles that he had collected as a young boy – I was thrilled to put the marble jar in our little library, and double thrilled to find out we already owned a resource book on how marbles are made! That’s what I am referring to, moms … to have books on hand for most subjects that will be interesting for your family.
{preparing dinner before 8:30 a.m. in the morning;
{Lariah is held and loved by so many!}
{bread dough rising on my Hoosier}
{a flight of fancy, making cupcakes one afternoon for the little ones}
{10 babies and this will never get old to me! Thank you, Lord, for my blessings!}
{a blissful moment of Luther and Lariah napping together in my room}
by Gigi
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