Where Do I Put All The Books?!

I've been asked several times about how I arrange all of our books.  We have A LOT of books.  Several years ago, I collapsed on the floor of our school room (at that time we had space for one, alas no longer) because I couldn't find a book I needed right then, the baby had pulled a couple of shelves of books onto the floor, and it had otherwise been a rough day.  I knew at that point I needed a system.

(Note that I took these pictures in real time.  I did not clean up things for you, or in anyway make them look pretty.  It was either a less than perfect blog post or none at all.)

Here are our kids/homeschool bookshelves.  They are the Billy bookshelves with extender from Ikea and I love them. (Click on any picture to enlarge and see detail.)

I decided to use those colored dots, that are sometimes used at yard sales, on the spines of the different genres of our books.  That way I could easily see if a book was on the wrong shelf.  So what follows is my system and it is so simple that it works and is easy to keep up with.

First up are our religion books.  We use pink dots for those.  One shelf is chapter books, and one shelf is picture books.

Science is yellow and has three shelves. (And wow, my boys are not great at reshelving books!)

Board books are light blue, and really don't need dots, but I was on a roll.

Green are our liturgical year books.  These only get pulled out for the book basket when it's time.

Orange are chapter books.  I briefly did another color for those in a series, but they really should all just be orange.  I shelve those in a series next to each other. I am running out of room for these books and they are taking over another shelf.

Poetry is blue, which is the same color for folk and fairy tales, because they used to be on the same shelf.  I should have given them their own color to start with.

History is red.

Again, folk and fairy tales are blue.  I keep them separate from other picture books, because I sometimes am specifically looking for one of these books.

Picture books are purple.  I try to group like books together (Little Golden Books, Beatrix Potter), but they don't always stay that way.  As long as they are on the right shelf, it's not too hard to find what I'm looking for.

I also keep a shelf for our music type books (I have another shelf in our front room that I'll show in a minute).  Another shelf is for readers and (what I call) Nature Lore. Up above are art portfolios, Mommy's It's a Renoir, and other randomness.

School books not in use, plus dictionaries and my Collier Junior Classics.

More homeschool books....

Because we do Morning Time at our dining table, I like to keep those books close to me.  I store them in this hutch (which I did not clean up for you, this is real life people!).

I keep Morning Time Binders next to it, and just had my dear, wonderful husband install my new white board above it all.  He loves me.  :)

My little boys keep their school books out on this shelf in our living room.  Our book basket is there too.  They each have a desk in the main rooms where they do school and I can keep watch over them.

Each of the big kids has their own book shelf in their room, where they have personal books, as well as their school books.  They do school in their rooms, where it's not so distracting.

...And because I know you are curious what's on Fritter's shelf, my book loving friends. :)

These are the shelves in the girls room.  They keep the craft books in their room as well, as well as their crafting supplies close by. (This just got cleaned up, which is why it looks so organized.  It almost never looks this good!)

The girls' school books.

And more books on their shelves.

Here are the shelves in our front room, where we keep the more "grown up" books (although my kids read things off of these shelves as well).  The bottom left shelf has more music books.

I hope that is helpful to see how I organize our books!  Happy shelving!!