Major De-Cluttering Going On

I have no pictures, you'll just have to imagine a couple of big basement rooms filled with books. A kind of crazy hodgepodge library filled with many, many unmatched bookcases and shelving units each filled with books, boxes of books, vintage magazines in magazine cases, plastic bins filled with books stacked and towering. Small bookshelves and tables tucked under larger worktables, shelves on top of the worktables..bins and shelves everywhere bins could be stacked or shelves inserted.


And books, magazines, ephemera -- all filling every possible nook and cranny in those shelves and bins. Shelves with rows of books behind books, books laid lengthwise across tops of other books (are all booksellers and booklovers cringing about now?) A frightening, yet surprisingly organized chaos of books.


Ever since I started working again with an open shop here, BookNation, I've been slooooooowwwwwwly packing up boxes of books and getting them on the shelves at the shop. Very slowly.  Weeks would go by without me bringing a single batch of books in. If I had taken a box or two in every week since we opened (Feb. 2009!) I might very well have very few books left at home (well, very few books for sale, we're not even discussing my personal library here.)


As this year began, I did begin to reclaim some space as fiber art studio space, but it wasn't much, and still had books on most of the shelves in it, though at least those shelves were only ones against the wall and the central area of the room was useful and filled with looms and bins of yarn.  And that is pretty much where things were when a month ago I suddenly found myself filled with energy and will to get these books moving.


It was probably the possibility that I might actually get the grant I'd applied for last February - a grant to get a small floor loom.  A small floor loom for which I had absolutely no room. The grant awards were to be announced at the beginning of August. So, mid-July, I started packing up books and taking them into the store.  After I'd taken 12 boxes, I swear I still could not see any appreciable difference in my space, other than there weren't books stacked over the tops of other books, books double-shelved.


Then my church was having a yard sale, so more books and assorted Stuff went out the door...it began to be apparent that things were leaving my house. Chi was released, began to flow, I was energized!! Oddly enough, other spots in the house began to get decluttered as things went along.


And then I got the grant!  That loom would definitely be expecting a suitable working space in which to reside and more and more books went, shelves were moved, bins emptied and stacked one inside the other.


So far, at least 34 boxes of books have left here and my loom arrived three days ago and....and...it nestles perfectly in the space I created for it!


Now, if I can only stop pricing, packing books and sorting and shredding paper (that's another post!) and organizing long enough to finish assembling my loom and begin working on the grant project!!!