Now Adding: Books!

Last weekend was fairly successful. I think I’ll be able to tackle the unfinished items later today or tomorrow. Let’s look at the plan from last week.

• Finish redecorating my blue display cabinet.
• Finish putting pretty backing on the display cabinet.
• Move the plastic baskets behind my desk to the bedroom/craft area.
• Reorganize the craft items.
• Make a space for wedding gifts to land (that’ll be starting soon).
• Laminate the various lists in my kitchen so they stop looking sad and pathetic.
• Finish putting my cooking herbs in their new containers.
• Make a meal plan.
• Make space for my folding bookshelves currently taking up room at my parent’s house.
• Fill in the new empty spot on my living wall.
• Convince Mom to let me have her still-packaged Lord of the Rings action figures.

Half isn’t bad, under any circumstances. The biggest one I didn’t tackle was created a landing zone for weding gifts — and that’s because doing so required tackling most of the uncleared items on the list. Instead, I found myself taking on my utility & laundry room once more and I’m hoping I’ll really like this configuration (especially once I get the rather overwhelming amount of laundry in there finished.

Here’s a sample of what I accomplished last week:

(Oops, stray Q-tip. Was gluing down some paper scraps that had come loose — guess I forgot to clear away one of the extras!)

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It was fun re-doing these shelves. I shifted some items around and it really feels like I’m taking better advantage of the space. I love that I have all my Tolkien/Tolkien-related books on shelf and all my religious books on another. Plus, my pretty, pretty Bible sitting on top! It’s a Barnes & Nobles exclusive classics series.

Oh, and the toy phaser? Still works, after 15+ years!

I picked up the new roll of contact paper I needed from Target to finish the back of the cabinet. I love how it turned out.

Moving on to the kitchen now. The laminator went to work.

And I added some washi tape accents to make these reference sheets pop a bit more.

I also finished with my spices! Or rather, I did as much as I could without making up new labels, which requires having access to Adobe Indesign. I love how the jars look with their new labels. I corraled everything that didn’t have a label beneath the shelf, which, fyi, is an old bathroom sink shelf from Wal-mart. Picked it up a few years ago for my apartment while I was working on my graduate degree.

These are the baskets I mentioned in my to-do list. I’ve had these for ages and they’re always handy. They’ve turned into catch-alls lately, so going through them was high priority.

I ended up deploying four of the baskets to the utility room and I also flipped the wire shelves around. This is a tiny, tiny room so storing anything in there is really tricky. I’ll do a more detailed post about this room another day. Once I’ve had time to climb up onto the washer so I can get some decent pictures! The last two baskets are still next to my desk but they’ll be heading to my bedroom once I’m ready to tackle the corner I’m planning to stick things.

The last item I crossed off last week was clearing a landing space for my folding bookcases — not only did I complete that but today my dad and sister brought me those very shelves and all the books that had been on them!

My pretty World Market shelves! These won’t be quite as accessible as the large shelves in the living room, so I’ve stares shifting over the long series books over to these. The shelf at the end is all Star Wars. I’ve moved over my Discworld books and also all my David Weber books. There are a few more extensive series and prolific authors I’m going to shift over.

I’m also going through the boxes of books and weeding out some to take to Half-Price Books.

The time has come and my Star Trek: Voyager books are going. This…is very hard for me. I picked up most of these during junior high and high school. I used to keep four or five in my locker or in my backpack once I could carry that from class to class. I have lots of happy memories of these books. I’d read them over and over again but…not anymore. I haven’t touched them in years and I don’t expect to anytime again the future. They’re just taking up space and gathering dust. So I’ll take them to HPB and hopefully someone else will pick them up and enjoy them. I’ll probably add a few more books to this box. I’m also going back and forth about adding my Star Wars: Young Jedi Knight books. I won’t be reading those again but the Star Wars universe is one that I collect — so do I get rid of these books? Would I just end up picking them back up in a few years just to round out the collection? I think I’m going to toss deciding this one to John. He’s as into the Star Wars universe as I am, so I know he’ll understand how big a decision this is for me.

I’ll be going through my books for the rest of the evening. It’s time to admit just how many of these I want to keep, how many I want to have on hand, and which I’ll never pick back up.

It’s going to be tough…but in the end, a clean sweep is what I need.