Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Controlling my Book Habit.

This is the time of year when everyone is either trying to lose weight, trying to stop smoking or trying to get their homes organized.  It's those nasty New Years resolutions nagging at us.  Well,  I'm in the third group.
I have been working away in the kitchen, purging and organizing, trying to get things under control.  One of the things I need to control in my home is my books  This is how I've done some of it.




















I'm a book lover. I like to read. I have some favorites I will even read over again and again. This goes for both novels and magazines.  I probably should have taken a picture of my magazines around November because they were starting to take control. There were piles in every room.  I needed to get rid of some,  so I went through them and took a bunch to our doctors and dentists offices.  Most of them were gardening and decorating mags of course, and I'm sure other people will enjoy them too. 




















This is just one shelf and most of these are my husbands. Wonder if I can get him to give some away... probably not.
With my novels I did something different. I had full sets of quite a few series, plus a ton of individual paperbacks.  A while back, before there was snow on the ground, I purged a lot of them at a yard sale.  I then used the money to purchase my absolute favorites for my e-reader.  Now I can take my reading wherever I go.  I did however keep a lot of my hardcovers and anything I had signed by the author. 
I even kept a few of my favorite magazines and some hardcover gardening books.

























I picked up these old crates and windows at a yard sale and  although I knew I loved the crate on top,  I wasn't sure what I'd use it for. I needed to keep it much the same as it was, I loved the HP sauce stamp on the side. (Did you know HP was the world's appetiser?)  And although you can't see it well in this picture, someone had written on the side of the crate with a grease pencil  "to Haliburton", and that's my town, so hey, I have to keep this one.




















About the same time as the magazine purge I realized that the few  I wanted to keep would fit in this crate.  So in they went, and sat it in the corner of my living room.  Then I couldn't move it. Wooden crates filled with books are very heavy.  Well my junk stash had five casters that had come from another project so I added four of them to the bottom of the crate.  This solved the problem of moving the crate, now I can vacuum in that corner.


























What I love about this solution is that the crate is exactly the same as it  always was and I know  it's original use.   Someone delivered goods to a store in my little town way back when, and people, who might be my ancestors, ate that product at the family dinner table.  That dinner was probably cooked on an old range or even a wood cook stove, and a whole family would enjoy it together.   One glance at my little book crate and I can envision the past, and that's even better than books.


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