Let’s face it. It’s a new school year, time for summer reads to be shelved away and space made for new fall reads (cue the pumpkin spice). It’s finally come time to clean out your bookshelf, which seems like a horrifying task, but not when you have the updated Bookwanderers guide to organizing the mountains of paperbacks that glare at you everytime you give them a glance. It’s time to stop procrastinating, and get to work!
STEP 1: Take EVERYTHING Out: Yes, EVERYTHING. Amass a giant pile of books on your bedroom floor, wipe out every nook and crannie, make sure those shelves are spotless! And it might seem like a mess in the beginning, but gutting the bookshelf is the best way to decide how you want to reorganize it. This way, you aren’t confined to the same order of books you had before. Maybe you want to go alphabetical, or by color. Whatever suits your shelf!
STEP 2: Decide Your Plan of Attack: New shelf, new life! You have complete control over the organization of your bookshelf. What we love to do is something different for every shelf, and we love to organize by age. For our shelf, we put picture, elementary and middle-grade books that we still can’t part with on the bottom two shelves, add graphic novels in rainbow order, stack up self improvement and autobiographies and memoirs in the same area, and pile poetry books on a higher shelf, along with YA and adult novels. We love putting series and classics on our highest shelf for books and organize them in a ton of different ways; stacking, lining up alphabetically, displaying them in color order, and putting magazines on the edge of one of our shelves for easy access.
STEP 3: Decorate Like There’s no Tomorrow: Now comes the best part: the decorations! Find every knick-knack you can – tiny stuffed animals you won at the state carnival, fake pumpkins from the Halloween decorations, (ornaments for wintertime!) candles from your mom’s bathroom, the flowers you painted in third grade, the real flowers from the vase on the kitchen table – quite literally ANYTHING you can find. We love to put candles, light up signs, letter boards, stuffed animals, art pieces, etc. Whatever floats your bookshelf and makes you happy!
and remember to . . .
STEP 4: BE UNIQUE!: The bookshelf works if you work. We’re talking creative, spectacular, the best curation of books you’ve ever seen! You are on a hunt for creativity when you redo your bookshelf. There’s something awesome about the way you created your bookshelf to suit you and the way you read, which leads to Step 5 . . .
STEP 5: Give Yourself A Big Pat on The Back: You deserve it. It’s been hours since you set up the grainy timelapse video to prove to your parents that you remade your bookshelf all by yourself – well, with our help, of course 😉
So, get started! It might seem daunting at the moment, but trust us, there’s no better feeling than a clean and cute bookshelf!
Happy Cleaning!
Love, the Book Twins,
Neerja and Nidhi
