Who Doesn’t Love an Organized Library? Part 2

Organizing Your Home Library

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Organizing your home library should be as enjoyable as setting up house when you were little. This is as much a part of home making as it is a part of homeschooling. For me, the home library can span many rooms and many spaces, it does not have to be relegated to the basement. I am going to talk about organizing your whole home library, not just your school library, because it makes more sense.

Where do you read?

Before you tackle the organization of your home library, make sure that you spend some time thinking about your space and what you want to accomplish in each area of your home in general. This will help you organize your books. Each space has its own purpose and so should each bookshelf and basket. You are setting up your home to reinforce the importance of lifelong learning. If your books are inaccessible or too far away from where you read they will be ignored. So, where do you read?

Room by room

Kitchen

That’s probably the easiest one to get started with. Cookbooks belong in the kitchen so that they can be easily accessible when it is time to cook and bake. Over the years we have collected quite a few literary cookbooks, which are not only full of yummy recipes but also beautiful and therefore very fun to display on an open shelf. The less pretty ones are hidden in the cabinet closest to the stove.

Bathrooms

The quintessential place for good literature, lol! Our bathrooms are small and because of potential accidents I was at first very reluctant to have books or magazine in these rooms but then I found a wall hanging basket and it has served us really well!
We usually store our magazines there for a few months and then cycle through them. The only caveat with literature in the bathroom, that I have found, is that it can easily create a traffic jam 😉

Bedrooms

Each child has a certain number of shelves in their room to store their own books. From early on, they have been taught to cherish their books and take good care of them. Many a toddler has had to learn you don’t step, snack or roll on books. The height of the shelf depends on the height of the books’ owner. Usually the younger child has the bottom shelves and then the next oldest has the next ones, etc… The shelves are usually also decorated with treasures and personal prayer corners.

Offices and craft rooms

Again more shelves, lol! In our respective offices are the books that we reach out for the most. For me it is anything I need to plan a homeschooling year as well as storing any home education gems and treasures that I re-read in whole or in part regularly. And in my sewing room are all kinds of quilting books, sewing books, embroidery books and other craft books. All close at hand and ready to be pulled out in a few seconds to open and start a new project.

Well, these were the easy ones, lol!
Now the more complicated living spaces: the living room and the school room!

Living room

We have two living rooms, one is large and very open and very few bookshelves fit there. I mainly use baskets for that space, as well as “end tables” to organize our books. I have divided the spaces in multiple areas.

Prayer corner

Our home altar also serves as a book shelf for our saints picture books and Bible related picture books. There is also a small end table (a crate, really) that contains catechesis picture books and a basket of seasonal books. 

Next to the main couch live two bookshelves with more recreational type reads: fairy tales, tall tales, comic books and farm literature, anything you would like to pull out and dive in for a little bit, even if you only have a few minutes. There is a shelf dedicated to our school reads for the upcoming week and two baskets, one on each end. This is where Morning Time happens. One is for what we are currently studying, nicknamed the “in progress basket” and the other is for our Daily Picture Books for the current month. On the coffee table live new books that have not been read yet, current read alouds, and on occasion just about any book you can imagine, lol!

“The Library”

Our second living room is smaller and contains a small couch flanked by bookshelves. A couple of toy boxes also live around there. This is everyone’s favorite corner. Board books and picture books are on the lower shelves and chapter books higher up.
On one bookshelf live our picture books in French, easy first chapter books, photo albums, parenting and marriage books. Next to it, across the doorway live all of our spiritual chapter books: children ones on the bottom and ones for more mature readers up above. 

On the opposite wall are board books, picture books and chapter books. 
The board books are not organized in any way, but the picture books are in somewhat of an order. 

One shelf contains the oversize picture books, such as Richard Scary’s books, as well as big picture books such as Winnie the Pooh and Curious George. Another shelf is for paperback picture books, with no specific organization, except by height. There is a shelf for hardcover picture books that is similar. But then, I had fun by author! Dr. Seuss lives next to Bill Peet and Steven Kellogg, while Jan Brett, Patricia Polacco and Tomie dePaola share an abode with Elsa Beskow, James Herriot and Max Lucado.

The shelves containing chapter books are a mix: some are all different genres but some are our historical read alouds and these are organized by time period or by collection, such as the Royal Diaries and the American Girl historical books. Laura Ingalls also has a shelf all to her own while Lucy Maud Montgomery shares with Louisa May Alcott. More general chapter books such as Agatha Christie and Ellis Peters reside in the upper shelves. 
We’ve been using the Ikea Billy Bookcases and they have worked really well.

That’s it for today, but we will look at the school room library’s organization very soon 😉

Love,
Mattie