This month, Family Fun Magazine has a ton of great ideas/tips to help organize your home.
Here is one that I loved and instituted immediately:
A book color code system using electrical tape.
When my sister Marissa and I were kids, we shared the attic bedroom. It was a magical place, and often messy. The slanted ceilings and having the top floor of the house helped the space to feel like a world all our own. We also enjoyed having a bird's-eye-view of who was coming and going and goofing around with our neighbor through our windows which were close enough to throw various items back and forth through!
But one of the most magical elements of our bedroom had to be the bookcase that encircled the entire opening of the staircase. This bookcase was sort of the heart of the bedroom. It held an endlessly rotating library of titles that included everything from babysitter club books to encyclopedias!
One fall, my sister and I created a system to organize our book collection. We didn't think it through too well though. I remember taping small alphabet letters to the binding of the book using paper and scotch tape. I think I was going for alphabetical by title...and it was fun while it lasted, but we didn't get far beyond the letter D.
This color code system suggested by Family Fun makes it so quick and easy to find your favorite books (and the tape stays on well but is very gentle on the books.)
All you have to do is create a key by categorizing your books. Here's what our key looks like:
The great thing about this system is that it's so easy to find what you're looking for, even if it's a mess. It's easy for Guy now to find the books on his reading level and interest. It's easy for Mom and Dad to find our favorite books to read the kids at bedtime. AND it's easy for the kids to organize the books now, because all I have to say is "go put all the orange books together and all the blue books together," etc.
As you can see, not every book made it into the color code system...just our very favorites, but we are loving our new color-coded library!
cool idea and I say that as a former school librarian...I even have my spices alphabetized...lol!
ReplyDeleteHmmm...I haven't tried electrical tape before. I put my mother's whole library in order at one point and we used a colored smaller sticker with the first letter of the author's last name on it and it was covered by a library quality clear sticker. My mom has a good 1,500 books, so this was quite a project! I got them all put in the computer too, so you can search the list. I'll have to tell her about colored electrical tape for any books we don't want to alphabetize but we do want categorized.
ReplyDeleteMy books look like a bomb went off. Good idea!
ReplyDeleteI developed this system in an after-school program I did, and implement it at home as well with our bookcases in each room. We love it!
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