It is finally time to start talking about our new home! It’s been a long time coming (not really, hard to believe but we’ve only been in this house for 2 ½ months), but I think it’s finally time to start sharing. I think I’m going to do this in a couple different posts, sectioning out our downstairs into 5 or 6 posts. This is the only part of my house (and just home in general) that I do share as I am going to keep the bedrooms and office private.
I figured I would start things off with what may be one of the most important spaces in our home (in only my opinion…my husband and kids beg to differ), our home library. While I couldn’t recreate my “wall of books” (HERE) from our last home, I was able to create a cozy little space and a full chunk of our downstairs just to the shelves.
So, we’ve got a little corner nook set up in this home, just off the main living room. In the center is the boys school table where they do their schoolwork as needed. I liked that I could have a similar “library” set up as you would find at their school with a table in the center. The way the house is laid out and the other rooms are set up, I ended up preferring this to have my reading chair in the corner.
Aside from the main shelves, which we will get to in the moment, I do have one end table that holds a variety of “coffee table” books that I reach for frequently, as well as my current month “TBR” stack of books. On the top of the shelves there is a wide variety of décor, the various castles we’ve visited on our travel, some important books (both childhood and adulthood), as well as a framed quote from Pride and Prejudice, my wedding dress, and a framed piece of quilled paper artwork.
Now on to the shelves themselves. There is a total of 5 (though I would like to get one more at some point and I’m sure I’ll need more in the future), and they are the Threshold Carson bookshelves from Target (HERE) in Espresso Brown. They’ve held up through two to three moves now and we’ve been really pleased with them.
A note of my organization system, I organize by “category” and then author last name within that. So, we’ve got (from right to left): Classics, Non-Fiction, General Fiction, Collections, Poetry, Memoir/Self Help, Religious/Belief/Spiritual, Manga & Graphic Novels. The final bookcase on the far left is my unread books. The goal is to keep my unread books to only one bookcase, preferably even less than that at some point, but as I’m a mostly mood reader that can only go so far.
I also split this chunk of our downstairs (which is an open floor plan) into both the Home Library as well as a kid’s space to play downstairs. As much as our boys love to play in their room (though not as much as we would maybe prefer) they inevitably bring toys downstairs and want to play near us. I wanted to have a spot for them to do that that was still “connected” to where we would be, but not right in our faces for noise purposes. This is also a Lego spot for them to have all their Legos to build and play as they want.
They have a main table (which is our old coffee table), then a little cabinet in the corner which holds books and school supplies (in the drawer), and a little shelf system which holds some more books. In between the two is where the Lego’s get stored in little plastic containers. The name signs are 3D printed from an Etsy shop called (linked HERE). I thought it would be a nice, personalized touch, as well as help with name recognition and spelling. They can also hang art projects if they like on the walls.
So, that’s the home library and kids’ section of the downstairs of our house, AS WELL AS the first look into our New York home. I hope you enjoyed this first peak, and I look forward to sharing more with you! If you have any specific questions, please let me know in the comments below.
A Cuppa Cosy 