This Weekend - Part 1

Boxes in the lounge! How am I going to watch TV??

Wow, my friends, this weekend Mark and I have come to a really big decision. That is to go through all our books, both read and unread, and to put some of them into storage due to space issues within the tiny tardis house.

I realised last night after chatting to the lovely Peter F Hamilton that Mark and I have been running MFB for around four, almost five years. And it's time to be realistic about all our gorgeous books. And to realise that having the shelves double and sometimes triple stacked, is not a good idea.

So, we popped by Big Yellow Storage this morning to check with them regarding space and costs and they were incredibly sweet and genial and within minutes we were sorted with a room, a LOT of boxes and advice.

It is now just before seven and I have just closed the lid on ten boxes of books that we have read and loved these past few years, that we want to keep but no longer have space for. We are being so organised, we even have spreadsheets of what is in each box. And each spreadsheet tells us how many books are in each box. The tally is 270 books thus far. Ten boxes, 270 books. That is pretty impressive. But, having said that, say around 60% of these books are ones we bought back in the days before we even knew about blogging and reviewing. I have worked my way through 3 bookcases with Mark doing the logging in of books.

Tomorrow, we are due to do a further 4, maybe 6 bookcases. I think we may need more boxes. I also have a pile of books that I have read and liked, but not loved. These will be donated to the library. I will also be joining BookCrossing and will be releasing them into the wild.

I feel so incredibly positive about restacking the shelves so that we only have single rows. It's also made the dining room appear so much bigger, suddenly. Oh! And, what we're doing is creating a bookshelf / bookcase for all our signed editions of our books. There are a lot of them but boyo, I cannot wait to brag with these.

I have to apologise for this very intensely personal blog on MFB but it is about books and we all love books. So here is the tour through the newly single row(ed) bookcases in the dining room. None of the shelves are ordered - it's usually just a case of which books fit together through size. We were considering doing them in genres or even by publisher but I just did not have the energy to do that. One day, when we are living in our HUGE mansion with library, we can then have it installed in this fashion.

These are the first two shelves you see when you walk into the dining room. It is not a full bookshelf as we have our beautiful glasses, champagne and Mark's whisky collection on display in this book case too.

Full bookcase - this is the one that was triple stacked. Seeing it single stacked is making me feel a bit twitchy. But I love being able to look at it and see the entire bookcase without having to pull out books in the front.

This is a lovely tall book case (pic above) that houses our hi-fi and cd collection too. So sadly, it's not a full of books bookcase, but it's close, 3 shelves out of 5. I have tried keeping series together, at least.

The final bookshelf - and the one that almost killed me. As I knelt down in front of it, the 7ft tall pile of books stacked between the two bookcases came tumbling down. Ouchie. But it encouraged me to get a move on. And I did. There is now nothing left of the 7ft book pile. I have one full double/triple stacked book case to sort out in here the dining room, tomorrow and also 2 three foot stacks of books.

Then we're moving next door, to the lounge, the book case on the landing and also the book case in the second bedroom. I hope I haven't bored you to tears. But I wanted somewhere to record this as it is - for me, at least - a huge step. I have to thank Mark for putting the idea in my head. Now I want to do all of it at once!

Check back tomorrow for the progress of the lounge and the upstairs of the tiny tardis house.