The one type of item that nearly every homeschool family is drowning in is…. books.
In our family, we can’t get enough of them. Picture books, coffee table books, books for the kids, history books, science books, math books, books for the parents,… the list goes on and on and on. In fact one night, not so long ago, my books visited me in a nightmare in which the entire house collapsed into the basement when I brought one more book home from the library sale.
STORE BOOKS IN UNLIKELY PLACES! IT IS SATISFYING AND YOU CAN SHARE THE PICTURES ON PINTEREST!
And so the big question becomes, where do you store all the books? After I ran out of bookshelf space, we got more book shelves. Then we ran out of places to put more bookshelves in the rooms, so we put bookshelves in the hallway and more bookshelves on top of our bedroom dressers. Basically our whole house looks a lot like a library… and strangely that is a very, very happy thing!
ORGANIZE YOUR BOOKS BY TOPICS, JUST LIKE THE LIBRARY AND THE BOOK STORE
So then we ran out of space again and yet there were more books that needed homes. I spent an entire school break taking out all the books, and sorting them by type. Now we had some basic organization:
- adult books (mostly fiction) in our bedroom,
- fiction for kids and teens in our living room,
- school books in our dining room,
- non-fiction (history, science, math, other) in our hallway
- cookbooks in our kitchen
- and each kid filled their room with the books that belong to them
For some reason all that shuffling worked and we ended up with a bit of room in the bookshelves for a while.
HERE IS THE BIG INNOVATION!
Then came the most impactful change to our book storage: flipping the books from a standing up to a lying down position. So instead of shelving them like everyone else in the world does, I sorted the books by size and laid one down on top of the other in stacks and placed those on the shelves. Now, this is not a perfect solution as book sizes vary wildly. The results, though were tremendous!
DOESN’T SEEM LIKE A BIG DEAL, BUT TRY IT YOURSELF AND SEE HOW COOL IT IS!
Stacking books in our shelves in a “lying down” position opened up over 40% of our shelf space! (I guess this makes sense when you figure that most books don’t reach all the way up to fill the height of a shelf so there is a lot of wasted space in the conventional book shelf.
There was an added benefit that I never expected: I can now read the titles of all my books without craning my head to one side. When the book is stacked on the shelf, the title is as easy to read as words on a page. It all makes so much more sense this way!
ALPHABETIZING IS YOUR FRIEND, AND A GOOD WAY TO REINFORCE THE ALPHABET FOR LITTLE ONES WHO CAN HELP YOU. MAKE IT A GAME!
The final tip to add is go the extra mile and alphabetize your books. We alphabetize within each section. That way we can easily find a book by C.S.Lewis in the “L section of the shelves in our bedroom (the kids are still young enough that most of C.S. Lewis is classified as adult). It saves time every day and makes life easier as a homeschooling mom to a pile of Doodles!
So, that is the full extent of my book storage tips, for now, and maybe now you can appreciate better my fear of waking up one morning with the entire house collapsed into the basement!
