Perpetual Organizer

I am absolutely a Perpetual Organizer. I get serious joy out of organizing, straightening, and rearranging. Only slightly OCD right?! But for real. There's something calming, stress-relieving and therapeutic about simple organizing and streamlining, to make my life just feel a little bit better! This past weekend I did some major cleaning in my room, and it feels so much better. I tend to keep my floor space pretty neat and tidy, but I pile up all sorts of nonsense in about four different places around the room, and it then proceeds to drive me crazy. But no longer! I tidied ALL of those places up, and it's such an improvement. I literally smile when I first walk into my room now, because the tidiness of the place just makes me happy! (Holy moly I'm a huge dork...)

But anyways...one of those newly super clean places is my bookshelf. I tidied up the top, which had become a catch-all for all sorts of mess, and then actually organized my books as well. I loaded up an entire box to donate to Goodwill, as well as a box of ones I wanted to just store in the basement for a while. Then with all that new space, I was able to reorganize the rest of my books. I actually had huge amount of books in 5 *giant* stacks, (three in my room and two in our family "reading room.") And now they've all been shelved!

These first two photos are the BEFORE shots, and that's my dog Mollie's crate down there. The top of it was one of the spots that I tend to just throw things and forget about ever putting them where they belong... don't worry though, all the stuff has been cleaned up, and her crate has been put in a better/less obvious spot in my room now!

Before any cleaning of the shelf or the crate...

After cleaning/moving the crate, but before organizing the shelf.

And now here are all the pretty pictures of how it looks now! I took off the ribbon of earrings, and did some purging of those as well, threw away some old perfume bottles, stored my college graduation regalia, cleaned and organized the right half of the top of it, and dusted the whole thing. The bookshelf itself is pretty old, and wasn't even new when I first got it. It's had some better days. Maybe one day I'll do some real work on it to get it into better, more attractive shape. But it works for now, and it at least looks nicer than it did before!

See my little penguin friend down there?! So cute :)

However, even with all of this new-found space on this bookshelf, I still couldn't fit all of my books onto it. So I had to house some more out in The Annex (as I've now dubbed it), in the family reading room. Most of these were books from college classes or I've read them already or something like that. Basically, not the ones I wanted the most access to, thus why they were chosen for The Annex. 

 

Quick story about The Annex - my dad and I found it for $10 at a garage sale a few summers ago, and I loved it. I bought it with the intention of painting it, but ended up liking the color more than planned. I think it's actually supposed to be a record cabinet, because there are a ton more shelves that aren't in there right now. I just think it's so cute, and my favorite part is the little scalloped edge at the bottom. Even though I didn't get a good picture of that cute detail, you can slightly see it from the inside of the door on one of the pictures...

So that's that! Newly organized and neatly arranged bookshelves. Makes me a happy, OCD lady :) However, some of the pictures in this post makes me realize that I should bust out my real camera a bit more often, rather than relying on my trusty iPhone for everything...oh well. Next time, right?

And Happy Organizing to you too!