Organizing Books and Magazines in the Living Room

If you love to read books and magazines, have you ever noticed just how disorganized your living room can actually get? While the easiest solution would be to stop collecting any new books or magazines, this is not really a realistic solution. The best way to get this mess under control is to begin using a little bit of your organizational skills. Organizing books and magazines in the living room, while initially time consuming, is actually fairly easy. All you have to do is set aside enough time to get the job done, and then follow these simple guidelines.

• Basic cleaning. It is really hard to get anything organized without having a clean slate. Go through your living room and do a light cleaning. This means that you get rid of any trash, do a light dusting, and generally straightening things up.
• Books. Collect all of the books that you have in your living room and place them in one location. As you collect them, develop a system that you want to use to keep them organized. For example, you can arrange your books according to genre, or alphabetically by author and title, or even by date of publication. As you go through your collection, take a serious look at the condition of the books, and determine whether you still want to keep them or not. Discard or donate any books that you no longer wish to keep.
• Magazines. Be sure that you have all the magazines that you own in one location, and then begin to organize them. The easiest way to organize your magazine collection will include using a few three ring binders and a three-hole punch. Arrange each of your magazines according to their titles, and their publication date. Use your three-hole punch to make some holes along the bound side of each of the magazines, and then place them into the binders. Use a label maker, or some other method, and label each binder with the title of the magazine, and the dates of publication. Once each binder is filled set it aside.
• Bookshelves. Bookshelves are the greatest way to help organize your books and magazine in the living room. Simply fill each of the shelves up with your collection. However, as you fill up the bookshelves, make sure that you use the same methods that you developed for organizing your books and magazines. This will help you to know where a particular book that you are looking for is when you want it. Once you have filled up your bookshelves with your books, place your binders of magazines up onto the shelves as well.
• Coffee tables. Coffee tables are a great way to be able to help organize your books and magazines, while also decorating your living room. However, you need to be careful when using your coffee table to help organize your books and magazines. The reason is that it is entirely too easy to place some books on your table, and just leave them there. If you plan on using your coffee table, then make sure that you only store your current magazines and books that you are reading. On average you should only have about three or four magazines and maybe one or two books on your coffee table at any one time.