I’m currently “on the road” for a 3 week stint. While I enjoy travelling I’d prefer to be at home a bit more at the moment, as I really want to get stuff out of boxes. Over the last couple of months I’ve become much more interested in sorting out my house than I have in spending time living out of a suitcase!
Up until about a week ago, however, I had nowhere to put anything that was still stuck in boxes. With the installation of the shelving in my home office all that has finally changed. While I was in Copenhagen at the ICANN meeting the cabinet maker / carpenter came and installed the first batch of shelves. The house was completely devoid of shelving and bookcases when I bought it, so I had to choose between either buying some bookcases or having some custom made. In the end I chose to get custom bookcases and other pieces made, as that gave me far more control over what I was going to get. For now I’ve commissioned three things, the bookcases for the home office, more bookcases for the dining room and a unit for the TV and AV gear, which will also hopefully store most of my DVD and Blu-ray.
Phase one is the bookcases in the home office and I have to say I am impressed.
Here’s what they look like before anything was put on them:
They are custom made bookcases that run floor to ceiling down two walls of my home office. The shelves are all adjustable, so I have flexibility when it comes to the size of books and other things that will end up going on them.
I got back from Seattle early this morning, where I was at a software conference, so I’ve spent quite a bit of today trying to bring a little bit of order to the chaos and have been emptying boxes of books onto the shelves. For now the key thing is to get the boxes out of the other rooms in the house and empty them onto the shelves.
Here’s a view of what I’ve got done so far:
There isn’t much logic to how the books are arranged for now. Eventually organising them by some kind of theme would probably make sense and I also need to offload some of the novels that I’ll never read ever again. I’d like to get all the cooking books closer to the kitchen and reference books should also be organised somehow.
I’m off to Germany in the morning for another event, so I won’t be able to get much more done until I get back towards the end of the week.
Overall the house is coming together nicely. Being able to empty several boxes and clear some of the space in the sitting room today made me feel a lot better!
Of course there are still quite a few things to sort out, but now that I’ve got some storage solutions in place it’s considerably more manageable. I’ve also realised what kind of things I need to get.
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