I am so excited! Progress does that for me.
I spent the weekend getting my new bookshelf and office organized. If you ever tore everything apart to fix it, you know that it requires making a bigger mess before you get it all set up. I’m in that middle stage and after I finish with housekeeping matters here at my computer, I need to get back to it.
My office is in one end of that giant space we’ve named “The Game Room” in our beautiful home on Jekyll Island. The other end of the room will have a really big TV mounted later this week (waiting on the contractor because I’m not sure about drilling into brick over the fireplace myself). There’s enough room for a pool table once everything is out of here (by everything, I’m including about eight boxes of books that need a home in the garage – after we clear off a shelf to make room out there). Basically, it’s sh*t shifting. We’ve been doing it since we moved in and started renovations. But by now, the game room should be finished and I’m out of excuses.
I never thought I’d be THAT person who agonized over how to arrange a bookshelf. But I was.
Some of it was obvious. Bobbsey Twins and Hardee Boys collections go together in the same area. I still need to put them all in order but that wasn’t a priority yesterday. There are two shelves of my TBRs (the to-be-read-pile) and another shelf of books I’ve already read and recommend that my guests can take with them. There’s also some of that kind of book in our guesthouse.
I saved a shelf for each of the books I’ve written so far. I dedicated another shelf to books that I promoted when I was working in public relations – those are sharing a shelf with the books I can’t bring myself to dump, like very outdated AP and Wall Street Journal style guides and Robers Rules of Order.
Books that were written by friends, or people I know, share a shelf with books about our favorite places (The Homestead, Bedford Springs, The Greenbrier, and Mountain Lake Lodge) and books about places we’ve lived (all the various editions of the Vieques coffee table book). At this point, there are two shelves for games, but the fact that there are about eight backgammon sets makes me think we could probably get that down to one shelf if we put our minds to it.
Two entire shelves are dedicated to cookbooks. I rarely use paper cookbooks anymore – I’m lazy and I can pull up whatever on my phone – but I couldn’t part with them. Some were mine, some were mom’s, and a few really cool old ones came with this house. I also have my grandmother’s recipe box.
I left one shelf space for my printer and a mailing labels station. If all goes well, I’ll be very busy sending out books from my house, too. Need to get it all organized!
When I’m finished posting this blog, I’m going to get up and walk away from my desktop so that I can finish putting away all the things that I noticed while taking the picture for this post. Is it my imagination or do rolls of packing tape multiply when you’re not looking at them? I’ll post new pictures when the office is totally fi9nished.
Until next time, happy reading. All three books in the Gem of the Golden Isles Series are available in paperback now here on this website!
Xoxo,
Sandy