Organizing Your Bookcases and Bookends

Bookshelves are the perfect place to store everything from books to knickknacks to your old high school awards and trophies. The only problem with this is that since they are so perfect for storing your things, things tend to accumulate those things and become extremely cluttered rather quickly. Since this is what happens, they are going to take a little work to get those bookcases cleaned, organized and attractive. There is some really good news though since the word work, in this case, does not mean a whole lot of physical work. Primarily, the work that you are going to be doing is more along the lines of some skull sweat—you need to do some thinking and planning.

With that in mind, here are some quick tips for organizing your bookcases, while at the same time achieving that look that you are looking for.

The first step to organizing any room's bookshelves is to decide what look you want in the room. If you are going for a playful, colorful, almost Lego look in a child's room, then keep in mind two little words: plastic crates. These can be stacked to make a colorful set of shelves for a child's room. These crates can usually be found in DIY stores. Or maybe, if you are looking for a "grunge chic" look, you can go for either milk crates, or believe it or not, cinderblocks and boards. All of these options are inexpensive and do not have to look unattractive.

Next you are going to want to organize those bookshelves. This is also something that doesn't take that much time, and is surprisingly easy. There are a couple of ways that you can organize your books, personally I would suggest that you use one of these two, either arrange them by size, or alphabetically by subject.

Both of these ideas have things going for them. By arranging your books by size you can come up with all kinds of eye-pleasing designs. Believe it or not, this can help you achieve exactly the look, or feeling, that you want your room to express. On the other hand, if you would rather have a more functional library then you are going to want arrange your books by subject and alphabetically. The biggest advantage to this method is that you are going to be assured to always know exactly where your books are. For your personal information, this is a rough and ready version of what the library system uses to organize their books. For those larger collections of books, there are more in-depth and detailed methods that you could use to organize your books, but that tip is for another day.