Knowing how to organize a bookshelf so it works for you is a great skill when you’re decluttering books or just want to make your shelves look a little nicer.
The Bookshelf of Doom
I have this giant wooden bookshelf in my office that I love. I’ve had it for years and it’s heavy and beautiful and holds a ton of books.
But it sits right next to my sewing machine, so over the years its accumulated some random sewing supplies.
And some just random other stuff from clearing off my desk or just not knowing what to do with something.
There’s art there, too, but you can’t really see it.
It was time for a change.
Evaluating Your Needs
A bookshelf is for books, right? Well, yes, but it can be used to store or display other things, too.
My big goal with decluttering the bookshelf this time around was to make space for my circular knitting machines. I have three of them and they float around the office when not in use and I’m sure one of them is going to meet a bad end some day.
I also want to be able to find the books I really use (these are mostly craft books, some of which I do reference regularly) easily and be able to put them back easily. Which is really how a shelf gets messy. At least my shelves. When I start putting books in willy-nilly then I don’t care as much about how it looks and it becomes a dumping ground.
And it would be nice to have room to display a little art, too, since this is a creative space, after all.
Decluttering a Bookshelf
The first step, of course, is to take everything off the bookshelf.
As I do this, I make stacks. If there are books I’m sure I don’t want to keep, those go in one pile. Books that don’t belong on the shelf, or ones I’m not sure about get their own piles.
I tried to stack the rest by genre, but it didn’t totally work. There’s a knitting pile, a crochet pile, a sewing pile, and some more general crafts/creativity stacks here.
While the shelf is empty, dust. Maybe light a candle, turn on your diffuser or use a clay diffuser to make it smell nice in your space while you work on how to organize a bookshelf.
How to Organize a Bookshelf
Once I knew what I wanted to go back on the shelf for sure, it was time to start reloading.
I started with the knitting machines on the top shelf since it has that awkward curve. The Addi doesn’t quite fit but I think it’s stable enough that it will be OK.
The biggest and heaviest section of books is the knitting books, so they go on the bottom shelf (this is the only fixed shelf so I think it’s stronger than the others and can support the most weight).
Most of these books were already here but I did remove a few I never reference. This shelf is a little bit of a TBR shelf, too, but mostly these are references I turn to when I need them.
The next shelf up has a few more knitting books on their side, as well as the couple of crochet books I kept as well as sewing books. I organized the books by genre but if you’re not wondering how to organize a bookshelf full of craft books, you might have a different way to organize, such as fiction versus nonfiction, different genres, favorites and to be read, etc.
And the last shelf, which is basically eye level, has more inspirational type books, general creativity, drawing, weaving, hand sewing, book making, body care recipes and the giant Martha Stewart craft books, which I will read some day.
There are still a few stacks of books to flip through, evaluating whether to get rid of them, but I liked the gap in the books that allowed me to display a little art. I’m not sure these are the pieces I want to keep there, but it’s easy enough to switch them up.
How to organize a bookshelf is going to be a little different for everyone, and every shelf depending on your needs, but this process is a good one to get you started!
