The Closet of Joy and Wonder

Way back last year, when we were first building the house, I decided that I wanted to take the largest of the 4 closets in the hallway and make it into a library niche. Unfortunately the contractor/builder doesn't do custom work, and put doors on the closet and put in a pretty useless shelf. Big closet, one high shelf that covered only half the width. Calling it pretty useless is a kindness.

I must note right here that I was able to do this because I'm single with grown children in a new house that has 4 closets in the hallway plus a 2-car garage. Storage space I got. Amanda does still live at home, but it's just the 2 of us in the house. I didn't have to consider anyone's collections of crap and/or feelings in doing this project, which makes a big difference.

Anyway, I was basically waiting to have some $$ to put the closet right. And in the form of my IRS refund, I had the cash, and a brother who needed to make some money doing some work. It's like the perfect storm, only with books.

It was a very long day that cost a good deal of money and involved me entering a Lowe's 4 times (3 times in the "good" one and 1 time in the unbearably stupid one) and a Home Depot once (where we got nothing because they wanted $14 more for a 4' x 8' white melamine board than the good Lowe's did). But in the end, it was worth it. You can see the finished pictures below. There are progress pictures posted on Facebook (if you happen to know me there) but I can't post a lot of pictures in one entry here, and I'm not feeling the urge for multiple blog entries today.

What we did was go to the home organization section of Lowe's and got single track shelving mounts (not sure of the technical name) to put on the walls. There are 2 each on the shorter side walls and 4 on the longer back wall. It took two 4' x 8' sheets of white melamine ripped down to 8 inch widths to make all the shelves, 12 short ones and 6 long ones. Then I arranged 48 brackets (and the brackets are the reason I had to make so many trips, I cleaned out one store and still didn't have enough and then some of them didn't match and the size were slightly different, it was a pain in the butt) so that there are 6 shelves on each of the 3 walls, forming a U shape. The short shelves took 2 brackets each and the long ones each took 4, so 6 shelves x 8 brackets; that's a lot of those. While I was buying brackets all over town, Luke (my youngest brother) was ripping down the melamine sheets and using an iron-on veneer strip to make the edges pretty. This was after he put all the mounts up on the walls and removed the door to the closet. Now when you walk down the hallway, when you pass Amanda's bathroom on the way to the back part of the house, there's a little library just sitting there. It's lovely.

Eventually all the brackets were right, all the shelves were in, and I unpacked the last of the boxes from the move. Four medium size boxes (which really are too big for books, but it's what we used) all filled with books and then another small box that just had cookbooks in it. Eventually I'd like a baker's rack type thing in the kitchen area and move the cookbooks there, but for now they're living with all the other books. As are all my "scary" books, which are the ones about tarot, paganism, Wicca, etc. I used to hide those in my bedroom, but not anymore. I am who and what I am, and they're part of me and part of that. The basic arrangement is done, but within the basic arrangement, I'm going through every so often and putting series books in order from left to right so they can be read in order. That might take a few days to get finished (the Sherrilyn Kenyon books are up next).

And if you're wondering if that's all the books, well the answer to that is no. I'm the kind of person who, when she finds an author, tends to want to have the whole back list, and I'm a fan of very prolific author Nora Roberts, so there's a large bookcase in my bedroom where my Nora books live (I have all but 2 of those, and I'll get Tribute when it comes out in paperback; I read it in hardcover from the library). There are also my professional medical transcription word books (dictionaries without definitions) in my bedroom/office area, and a separate shelf for the books I have listed on Paperback swap that are no longer keepers. Someday I'll clean the weird stuff off the Nora shelf and I'll post a picture of that one, too.