Purging and Reorganizing My Book Shelves

Caution: This post contains a large number of huge pictures.

I have a problem. I might go so far as to say I have an addiction. I can't stop buying books. I have bookshelves in most rooms of my house and have run out of walls to build more. The time has come for a major weeding and reorganization of my shelves.

This is what precipitated the book purge. Here are adult books that are TBR and don't have a home - 3 laundry baskets, 2 milk crates, two cloth grocery bags and two boxes. Needless to say, I can't find a book when I want it. Luckily, I list all the books I own on my LibraryThing account so that I know if I already have a book. That doesn't mean that I know where it is though.

I currently have bookshelves in my family room, my Master Bedroom, and my office. It is my goal to make the shelves in my office my adult TBR pile. That means I need to weed the books I have already read to get rid of enough books to empty those shelves. 

I spent all day Saturday going through the shelves in my family room which contained authors B - L. Running out of space there meant that all the A authors and quite a few of the B authors had moved into the office. Here is the finished (?) family room.

Now the first shelf starts with A and I have four empty shelves at the end. Next, I need to move into the Master Bedroom which currently looks like this:

Here is the current state of the Office shelves which have authors S - Z:

Unfortunately, the bottom two shelves on the right section of bookshelves are already TBR books. I don't think that I will have space to empty all the bags, baskets and boxes onto the shelves I am going to be able to clear. I will likely have books two deep on the TBR shelves but that is still better than the current mess.

Here is what I am getting rid of:

There are seventeen grocery bags of books containing 575 books - 72 hardcovers, 36 trade paperbacks and 467 Mass Market Paperbacks. I have a couple of friends who want to go through the bags but whatever is left is being donated to the Rochester Friends of the Library for their annual sale. I can't wait to get these out of my house and into the hands of readers who would like them.

I think I still have one more weekend of work in order to finish the Master Bedroom and the Office but I can at least see the light at the end of my organizational tunnel. I can't begin to tell you how good it feels to be getting de-cluttered. I thought it would be harder to get rid of books than it has actually been. I think it helps that I am donating the books so that other readers can have a chance at them.

PS. I have thirteen boxes of books containing 418 titles in a closet that haven't been opened since I moved to this house twelve years ago. I think I will be getting rid of those too and regaining some valuable closet space.