Making Our Books Pretty

There are plenty of wonderful blog posts, photos, and decorating/design articles about styling bookcases/bookshelves. Trust me – I have scoured the internet and my collection of magazine clippings for tips on how to tackle our two living room bookcases. Here are some of my favorite tips for styling a bookshelf:

While all of these bloggers have some great tips, my problem with many of these photos and tips is that, in the end, the bookcases are often full of more beautiful objects than books. As you can see from our bookcases, we really need them to store books – go figure.

Of course, I have found some beautifully styled shelves for inspiration.

Source: Pinterest

Source: Home DIY Remodeling

Source: Pinterest

As I’ve mentioned, I am not thrilled with our current ‘styling’ of the living room bookcases. It all still feels a bit too cluttered for me. A few re-styling options I am considering are:

Have a few “all book” shelves. It looks like I would probably need three full shelves on each bookcase. I could then make the remaining shelves purely decorative.
Reorganizing the shelves to group books by color. Right now the books are loosely organized by topic and then put in size order. Maybe if I focused on grouping the books by color and then by size it would look better.
Take out a shelf from the left bookcase. As you may have already noticed, our right bookcase is missing one shelf. One option would be to remove a shelf from the left bookcase to make the bottom shelves the same height and to then put wicker-ish square baskets on both bottom shelves to house our cookbooks (on the left bottom shelf) and my scrapbooks (on the right bottom shelves).

Thanks to some amazing friends/readers, I am going to try out a bottom shelf of baskets first and see how that goes.

What is your biggest clutter challenge?