We, or rather I, have a fairly vast book collection. In our previous home (skipping over our short stay in a Grade II listed Georgian property) I built a set of shelves covering one entire wall of our lounge. Whilst this didn’t accommodate all our books, it dealt with the lion’s share. So a few other areas of shelving around the place held the rest.
Since moving to March we’ve never yet had enough shelving. So many books have remained either in storage, or simply messily piled in various places. We’ve acquired several sets of shelves, some really quite nice, off Freecycle. One is fully laden in our guest room, another is over-filled on the landing. And their are several in the box room, also full to overflowing.
As is my way, I also like to build my own shelves. There are now several around the house: in the lounge some are built into an alcove (I plan to work on these today), and in our master bedroom there are two, both made from rough scrap wood, one pretty shoddy, and the other actually quite decent. A third larger set, made from poor quality timber, fell apart under the strain. The cleat for hanging the latter remains on the wall.
I’ve also made several sets of mini-shelves, one as a paint rack, for my Vallejo model paints, and two for displaying my models on. Then there are three very rough boxes, recycled from the broken bookshelf mentioned earlier, in which I store what remains of my vinyl LP collection.*
And we also have need of other types of storage, such as hooks for hanging guitars. I’ve put up four so far, two in the lounge and two in the guest room. I think there should also be at least one in the master bedroom – prob above the recently restored chest o’drawers/Philips record-player? This last one I hope to make and install today.
* I sold about half my records at boot sales over the summer. Kind of wish I hadn’t. But we needed the money.