07/19/2009 ROY G BIV IT UP!

I've always loved beautifully organized bookshelves. Bookshelves are such a focal point in a room, and as a renter, rearranging your bookcase is really the biggest decorating outlet you have (without risking losing your security deposit! ). Quite a while ago, the Red Eye Chicago featured a "how to spruce up a small space" article, and one of their suggestions was to color-coordinate the books in your bookshelf. I've been strongly considering it ever since and this afternoon decided to take the plunge! Come to find out through doing a Google search that this is a newer trend and a lot of people have done some really cool bookcase makeovers using this technique. My friend Kim didn't think she could do it because her collection is so large and she likes organizing her books by topic. I can definitely see where this technique wouldn't work for those die-hard book fans. My husband and I don't hang on to every book that we read (it's rare now for us to buy books from the bookstore instead of getting them used or from the library) and recently in an effort to de-clutter, we rid ourselves of many of our books, which honestly felt great! Some people have told us that they could never get rid of their books. I think I felt that way once upon a time, but living in a teensy space for this long has prompted me to try to shed as many of our possessions as possible (don't get me started on my husband's magazines! ). Perhaps after we've moved into our mansion we'll work on building up our library again: -)

I can’t find a pic from when we color coded our bookcase in 2009, but I did find this one from 2017 (with our cat Grady) where you can see we were still shelving by color.