Over the last couple of months my bedroom has been completely redecorated for the first time in far too many years. I’ve been putting it off for a long time, I knew that I’d have to go through everything and get rid of a lot of the stuff I’d accumulate over the course of about 15 years – not a fun prospect. After 30 years my parents have got to know the sorts of things to do and say to encourage me to do things, and so I was promised brand new bookcases as part of the redecoration – suddenly the idea didn’t seem quite so awful.

I have done pretty much all the clearing out and I’ve been rewarded with a gorgeous room, new bed, and the promised bookcases. Last Thursday I was given custody of these bookcases, made to measure by my dad:

I took a look at the many boxes my books were temporarily residing in and knew that I needed to stop and make a proper plan of action – I only wanted to put the books on the shelves once, and I wanted to take advantage of having so much more shelf space and have my books in a nice, orderly manner.

I ended up making lots of piles of books on the floor:

(this all made sense in my brain).

And then I started to fill the shelves. For the big bookcase I started by putting the adult hardbacks and trade paperbacks on the top shelf (split into fiction and non-fiction) and the adult paperbacks on the next 2 rows of shelves.

The children’s and young adult books then went onto the same 2 rows of shelves, I put them in front of the adult because I know I’m less likely to want to refer to the adult fiction.

The third row got the tv tie-in fiction, again double stacked, and has the one empty shelf at the moment – my library books are currently sitting it in but I know that won’t last! The bottom row got two shelves of my film and tv reference books, and then my random non-fiction.

The smaller bookcase got custody of my unread books – that’s the top two rows. The bottom left is my graphic novels and the bottom right is my slowly growing writing reference book collection.

I know that when I work my way through my unread books I’m going to have to have a rethink. I’ve already got a couple of ideas, though it should be a good few weeks before I’m having to put them into practice!