Area #19: Family Room

The other side of the room from the toy area is our family room.  We don't use it a lot mainly because it's colder down there than the rest of the house.  It's where our tv is, so we use it for watching movies and I'm sure we'll be down there a lot more during the hot days of summer.  When we first moved in, I set up all of our books on the huge built in book shelves.  The main counter area has been a collecting spot for lots of things that I finally cleared out and gave a home. 

When it came to organizing my shelves, I thought of many ideas I have seen over the years.

The horizontal stacks:

 The rainbow:

The style I liked the best was like this:

A combination of vertical and horizontal stacks with misc. art, pictures, objects filling in the spaces.  At our old house I had all of the books arranged by author's last name with fiction and non-fiction separated.  Here I decided to spread things out and arrange them by subject.  Marriage, children, Bible reading aids, evangelism, gardening, and others are how I divided the books.  I also kept the shelf right above the tv open for our movies.  That shelf is also 'home' for the remote so that we don't waste time looking for it when we need it. 

Here are our shelves, and yes, Evelyn was watching Veggietales while I was doing my organizing...

I want to find more decorative things to put on the shelves as either bookends or to fill up the empty spaces.  That's one of the things on my thrift sale list.