Purging and Reorganizing My Bookshelves Part 2

I'm finished! I spent most of Saturday and Sunday finishing my reorganization project. Check out this post to read about the first part of the project.

Here is the Master Bedroom after I finished removing books I don't plan to read again.

Note that I even have four empty shelves!

Here is my office ready for the adult TBR books. 

The bottom shelves were filled with a variety of teaching materials. I sorted through all of them too. Now my teaching stuff is all on just one shelf. I had many outdated materials and way too many ideas for the years left before my retirement.

My next step was to organize all the boxes, baskets and bags of TBR books. I began by making piles all around my family room and master bedroom. I sorted all of the books by author and then alphabetized each letter completely. For efficiency in the use of shelves, I alphabetized the hardcovers and paperbacks separately.

Here is the finished TBR room.

I have so many empty shelves that I am almost tempted to go book shopping. After I took this picture I did use three shelves on the right side bookshelf for some of my videos and DVDs. But there are still four completely empty shelves. 

Here is the finished office. Now I can see the ugly carpeting that has been in that room since I moved to this house in 2001. I haven't used this room for much other than storage. I finally took down the 2010 calendar that was on the wall.

During the whole project, I removed 1075 books from my shelves. I had seventeen bags after I did the first half. A friend stopped over and took eight bags of books for herself and a friend. I brought nine full grocery bags to the public library for their Friends of the Library book sale. This week I filled fourteen bags as shown here:

I'll give my friend another chance to sort through the bags and then bring the remainder to the library next weekend. 

Now I just have the large walk-in closet in the master bedroom to clean out. It is filled with 12-15 boxes of books and lots and lots of clothing that I have just tossed in there at each season or size change. It will be sort of like going shopping. I hope my enthusiasm for cleaning and sorting doesn't wear off before I get the closets cleaned out. 

Wish me luck!

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.