Over the past few months I’ve been slowly amassing more books. This is either from picking them up from the little libraries around my neighborhood or taking books back from my parents houses. The shelf on my Billy bookshelf has slowly been getting fuller and there were books being squeaked on top of other books. đą The whole thing didnât look cute, and that is a sign that somethings need to go. So that’s what todays post will be about.
This is the before condition of my bookshelf. It’s not in the worst condition ever, but there is room for improvement. The first that happened was that I put the shit that didn’t belong there away. Like my dusting cloth, the duct tape and the scissors.
After that I took everything off the shelf and sorted it into the following categories:
- Hobbies   Â
- Yarn Based Â
- Sewing Â
- Gardening Â
- Cooking
- Business/self-development
- Architecture/design
- Fiction
After that, I flipped through the books and determined what I want to keep and get rid of. The biggest ones I wanted to tackle were the two massive gardening books. Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening and A Year in Gardening. As someone that only has a balcony to work with, I do not need two reference guides for gardening. Flipping through them, it was clean that the Illustrated Guide to Gardening was the keeper. It has a couple chapters on indoor plants and the information looked really cool.
The Year in Gardening assumes you are in England, it did have a beautiful guide for what flowers and such will be in bloom at what point in the year which hopefully will be helpful to someone with a garden in my neighborhood. There were drawings and information that crossed over in both books. So the winner was clear.
Next was looking through random knitting and crochet patterns that I have. I took pictures of the patterns in books that didn’t have enough to be worth keeping the whole book and I added those patterns into my OneNote and put the books into my outbound pile.
That method was the same for the cook books.
I got rid of the urban planning/design books that didn’t talk about Canada, and one landscaping book since I have a feeling the world of design has evolved past it, as it was published in the 80’s.
I kept all the personal development books as I’m working my way through them. I’ve always had the intention of putting them back in the little libraries once I was done with them so I’m not emotional attached them.
I’m really happy that all the books I’m keeping fit on the shelf. There’s even room to fit more if I wanted to in the future.
But where is everything that was decluttered going? I’m going to go for a walk and drop when off/return them to the little libraries around my neighborhood. Also return the books that I borrowed from my parents or friends.