Challenge #1- Getting Creative with our Book Storage

I now have a fair number of blogs that I follow through my RSS feeds and other methods. One of those I added a month or so ago is Honey Bee Books.  Through this blog I found out about the Little Book Adventure of 2012.  This is a cool initiative created by My Little Bookcase out of Australia.  I know because we are in North America we will not be eligible for any of the prizes but for us that is not a reason not to participate.  I am always looking for new and excited literacy projects and challenges with my kids and this is a perfect fit for us.  So I registered us and we got started.

Challenge #1: Get Creative with your book storage.

We have A LOT of books in our house.  It is a bit of a pet peeve of my husband’s but he has slowly learned not to complain when I bring home more books for the kids – he complaints are futile and fall on deaf ears.  The problem we now have is that we have so many great kids books but are running out of places to put them.  I am not ready to purge but I want to make sure we can find those great treasures when looking.  This was a perfect task for us.

Most of the books are in the kids rooms but I wanted to start included some in our playroom so I hit pinterest for ideas on easy, and inexpensive book storage.  I quickly came across rain gutter book shelves that would be perfect for the location I had in mind. I pinned a few sites but the most useful was at Raising Olives.  She gives a great step by step guide for installing shelves and of someone as unhandy as me this was perfect.  For full disclosure I didn’t end up doing most of the tricky parts.  My dad is who I usually call on for all things handy and he did most of the cutting and installing.  I also knew that I wanted to personalize the shelves for the kids and over at More than Mundane she shared with me how acrylic paint worked when she decorated her shelves.

So they turned out pretty good.  I am not an artist but I did manage to paint each child’s name on their shelf and then I let them decorate them with stickers I picked up at the dollar store.  In total the three shelves, completely installed was less than $100.  The gutters themselves are rather inexpensive but the brackets and the ends add up quickly.  I wanted them pretty sturdy since little hands will be putting books in and taking them out so I used 3 brackets on each 5 foot shelf.  I also put Michael’s shelf at the bottom so he can reach his books, and it also works best as he can’t reach Kaitlyn’s books – which he like to rip sometimes.

Our New Playroom Book Shelves!!

Once the new shelves were up we decided it was time to organize ALL our kids books.  These new shelves were going to hold feature books.  Every month the kids can change which books they put in the shelves but these are to be their choices only (Mommy and Daddy have no say)!

We have other book shelves in our house for kids books.  Right now both of the girls have castle book shelves in their rooms. We working on deciding what style to build Michael (and by we I mean Grampa who is the handyman).  For now Michael’s book are just stacking on his toy shelf in his closet.

Kaitlyn’s Shelf

Eileen’s Shelf

Michael’s Closet

There are a couple of other locations of books around the house.  In the playroom we have a bin of mini board books that are at perfect height for Michael.  In our kitchen island there is a shelf with ABC books the kids often read when I am planning dinner.  Finally, in the great room there is a small unit that has book that I have picked out for the kids.  These are often books we have done activities around or will be reading soon.  Any books that I blog about (and all our getting ready for Kindergarten book) will be added to this shelf.

We had fun on our first challenge and look forward to challenge #2!