My latest project

My super-quick, easy project of creating a library out of a laundry room is finally complete, and guess what? It wasn't super-quick, and it wasn't easy.
But I'm beginning to see that it was worth it, in at least a dozen different ways.
We took our laundry room, moved our washer and dryer to the garage, and took out the sink, cabinets and shelves.
Then I hired Tex, the slowest, most pitiful carpenter on the planet, and waited endlessly while he sprained his ankle, wrecked his truck, had two episodes where he thought he was having a heart attack, got stung by a bee and finally, slowly, shelves were put up in the space.
And then I took all of my bins of books, which I've been accumulating for years and years, sorted them by category, labeled them, re-sorted them, re-labeled them, and let the kids at it.
To answer questions: The reason books are in bins and not on shelves is because it saves space, is much less messy and is 3,000 times more kid-friendly.
Bins mean that all books are facing forward. A small child who can't read, or even a bigger kid who could never read the spine of a book, can flip through a bin of books and look at the cover and choose the one she wants.
In one bin, 12 inches wide, I can fit 30-60 books, depending on whether they're softcover or hardcover. In that same 12-inch space, if I put books on the shelf, I could fit about 12-15 books standing on edge.
Also, kids have a hard time putting books back on a shelf if they're on edge. Frankly, I do, too.
It's much easier to replace a book into a bin than it is to find the spot on a shelf where it belongs, shove other books out of the way and replace it. And if it's hard, little kids won't do it.
So they'll take out 20 books looking for the one they want and leave them in a pile on the floor.
This way, they flip through the bin, grab the book they want, and sit down to read.
We have them sorted into categories that make sense to us, and each bin has a label with a picture on it, so even non-readers or beginning readers can see what's in the bins.
We have two huge bins of books on the floor, labeled "Kid's readers."
These are our favorite books that kids like to look at and read to themselves -- everything from "Red Fish, Blue Fish," to "Goodnight Moon," "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" and "The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig."
One of my kids is a beginning reader, and he likes to sit and read these to himself. My little one is not yet two, and she likes to beg anyone within grabbing reach to read them to her. She also has a huge box of board books just for her, but she's almost at the point where she's ready to move on from those -- she knows she gets more story time from the "real" books.
For homeschooling, we have all sorts of bins. "Romans and Greeks," "Mythology,""Pirates, Knights, Vikings, King Arthur and Robin Hood," "Middle Ages," "Egyptians," "General History, reference," "General History, readers," "Science readers," "American history, non-fiction," "American History, readers and fiction," "General History that's not Egyptian or Greek or Romans or Pirates or King Arthur," "Shakespeare," and others.
Then I have bins for curriculum, workbooks and planning materials -- math, science, writing and grammar, phonics, reading, and a bin for parenting/homeschooling/planning books.
The next part of the plan, and this is going to be a lot longer process than I anticipated, too, is to catalog all of the books.
There's a great website called Librarything.com. The whole purpose of it is to catalog your books online, whether to sell them, keep track of what you have, use it as a lending library or just to count your books.
They have a scanner they sell for $5 that lets you import each book by scanning the ISBN code. It's not as quick and easy as it sounds -- you still have to scan each book, label it with which bin it's in, add tags so you can search for it, etc.
However: The upside of this is that when Sawyer's studying the Romans, as he's doing now, I know what we have. When I go to a curriculum sale or hit Half-Price Books and I see a bunch of stuff about the middle ages, which we're doing next year, I can look to see if we already have the books. I can have friends log in and see if they need to borrow anything for their year, and I can mark books checked out if they're gone.
I've entered in about 500 books so far, and I'm sure I have about 2,000 more to go. I'm doing one bin a day, and there are 48 bins. It's going to be a while.
However: I've been homeschooling for ten years. When I first started, my nephew was 11, I'd never taught anyone to do anything except blow a bubble or ride a bike, and I was terrified. I went and bought a textbook, handed it to him, and said, "Read this and answer questions."
I would have been so much better off if I'd told him to go read some of the books I had on the shelf!
I've been collecting books about things we love or things my kids should know about since then, and my youngest daughter will be two in June, and if all goes well, I have another 16 years homeschooling her.
So I figured I'd get organized now and save myself the trouble later!
And the best part about the library, and a complete unforeseen benefit? The kids, on their own, went and got pillows and blankets, lined the floor, and made a reading nook. They go in, grab a book, and settle in for hours. I'm going to have to put a light in there and make it permanent, I think.
What a great place to read -- I wish I had something like that when I was little!