This weekend, I began Phase One of a larger decluttering project: purging our enormous collection of books over the coming year. This is the kind of project my mother has been hounding me to do for years, and one I’ve tackled in smaller ways before, but am committed to following through on this time. Here are the steps, as I see them:
- There are four major locations in our house where we have collections of books: each of the three bedrooms we use, as well as the front room downstairs, which we call the “piano room” but I also think of as our library, and was probably called the “parlor” a century ago when the house was built.
- Each of these locations needs to be tackled individually to sort out which books are no longer necessary.
- These books then need to be gathered up and dropped off at the Baltimore Book Thing.
- Auxiliary locations must be addressed: the kitchen shelf with my cookbooks on it, the box of books I suspect is lurking in the basement, my classroom shelves.
- Bookshelves should be cleaned/dusted.
- Any unshelved books need to be shelved.
First up was the piano room, which I began while my husband shouted at the Ravens-Houston football game and my kids played upstairs. In earlier purges, I’ve targeted novels I never liked or will never read, as well as graduate school texts I will never use again, but this time, I found myself being able to eliminate even more categories. A lot of my parenting books are gone now, the ones about babyhood, toddlerhood, raising little girls and new motherhood, and I winnowed my graduate school books down even further. At this point, I’ve got a laundry basket full of books, as well as three heavy black trash bags, all ready to be set free, back into the world. I dusted all the shelves (or at least, the fronts of them and the tops of the remaining books), and did a purge of knickknacks while I was at it. There are some piles of books on my bedroom floor, so my next goal is to move them all downstairs in the hopes that they will fit on the downstairs shelves now. Sometimes I think about sorting the library shelves by category, but I just don’t think I’m organized enough to maintain that!
Purging my books has been hard for me in the past, and it’s still a daunting task, but I felt calmer about it this time, and it was much easier to let go. Looking at titles about raising two-year-olds, I knew that part of my life was over, and if I ever do another graduate degree, I have a much better sense about what it will or won’t include. As my life has gotten more focused, I think my personal library has too, and that seems like a good thing.
Related articles
- bookshelf organization (audneal.typepad.com)
- Plumber Bookshelves (swagsofresh.com)
- A waste-less approach to the purge (thehappiestlife.net)
- The Great Purge of 2011 (cozycakescottage.com)
