July 26, 2012

Hoarding and my latest hobby. COMBINED!

Today would have been a nice day to be a stay-at-home Anna. The four front offices are all vacated today so it's just me and Douglas street. I feel a throbbing head ache coming on for no other reason than I'll be banging it against a wall shortly to stay awake. That's called foresight.

I've been reading blogs today to keep myself occupied, and am going way back in time (since I've read all the recent posts). In doing so I came across this little gem. I LOVE it. I was trying to figure out if I could actually manage this, but I'm sure I could. I have more books than spaces for them (True story. Even though I'm now organized and boast that I actually have more room for books with the current system I actually have 40 or so books hiding in our entertainment center) so I'm sure I could get some rocking colour scheming happening.

I also have an obscene amount of hot pink books. Grouping them together from a colour perspective might make my Meg Cabot obsession seem less juvenile and more artistically inclined.

Our bookshelves aren't wall to wall like they are in the picture but I'm sure I could do something fun with the space we have. Two separate bookcases and a windowsill in our living room could lead to some fun happenings. We also have two IKEA Kirp shelves (the ones shaped like check marks that they apparently don't have anymore) and another bookcase in the other major room of the house (the dining/reading area, or as I like to think of it, the garage portion of the suite). I'm not sure I could do anything with the bookshelf by our dining room table as it's more "decorative" and "functional." In other words, it looks after the super big books (yearbooks, Aesop's Fables, cookbooks), spices, photos, and my second teapot. The first teapot lives on the stove. We have limited cupboard space and an excess of teapots.

I'm going to take a quick tangent from my rainbow book obsession to tell you that my latest attitude towards our living space is that "we can do better." I actually got that from work. When I first started the lady boss kept saying that about some stuff around the office and it really stuck in my head. Sure, we're making do with our overcrowded space and have been for the past two years, but lately I can't help but think that, yes, we can, in fact, do better.

For example, I used to hate our living room. It was always so messy and felt like such a dark, uncomfortable man cave. Laundry was always in the middle of the room, knitting always took up a 2/3 of a couch (I only need one cushion) and it just felt so dark. Putting books up on the window sill and covering up the glass with polka dot wrapping paper (poorly, but from a distance you can't tell) actually make the room look so much more inviting. The biggest miracle is that it's stayed clean! I'm not sure what it is, but ever since I kicked the living room's butt into shape a few weeks ago it's stayed that way. I was using it as a temporary art station but other than that it's been clean. CLEAN! In our home that's a freaking Christmas miracle.

I made art.

One final tangent note is that we made a poor judgement call and got white carpet in the living room. The guy tried to talk us out of it but without kids and a dog we figured we could handle it. We were woefully ignorant. Nothing but a hardcore steam clean is going to get that sucker clean. It has a giant grey mystery stain on it that refuses to come out. Mom says we need an area rug, Karl agrees, but I fear adding a rug to our already cramped space. Won't that just make it look teenier? Now you know my deepest, darkest living room insecurity. Well, that and finding both corpsified and living spiders in my knitting basket again.

Back to my book fantasy!

I've been on the fence about this colour grouping thing, though. I like having my series all together and feel like it could be confusing doing it otherwise. How does it make sense to have The Chamber of Secrets on one bookcase and The Prisoner of Azkaban on another? One nice thing is that I have a fairly decent memory for what my books look like so I could probably just take a gander and find what I'm looking for. I've also always made an attempt to keep my more "intellectual" books in a more prevalent location than those about teenage princesses in Doc Martens. Plato and Princess Mia are about as far as they can get while being in the same room. Leviathan and Every Boy's Got One could conceivably end up side by side now. Just kidding, Leviathan's dark blue and Every Boy's Got One is white. See? Dang I know my book colours. 

I think I'm going to give it a go. It seems like it might be a fun Thursday/Friday evening activity and it's easily reversible. I normally try to keep my books together by series, sometimes grouping one author together, and then putting them out in a way that makes me look smarter than I really am or sorting them by things I want to read sooner. Easier access. I think I'll just leave my Hunger Games trilogy in it's box set and either put it somewhere else or just turn it so that you can't see the spines and only get the black side of the box. 

Is it weird that I'm so excited yet nervous about this crazy move towards rainbow sorting my books? Do I sound like a crazy person? All I know is, we can do better. Yes we can.

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