Books in Bed

I’ve decided Marie Kondo is right, you should really KonMari your house all at once, rather than doing a little bit at a time.

I said I was going to do like one bookshelf a day and that started off well but I found myself with a half a bag of books to discard and felt the need to just fill the bag, so I moved to another shelf. Which led to having another not full bag and so it went.

Before I knew it, we had done all of the bookshelves in the office! That was a lot of books and we got it done in just a couple of days. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough grocery bags to pack them all up. I never thought I’d reach a point in my life where I did not have enough grocery bags. That’s just nuts.

We’ve got 24 bags of books ready to go. I have enough for another three or four bags full stacked up on the dining room table, because I think I can scratch up enough bags for those. Then, we’ve got a flat box that came from our last Costco visit filled with books — that’s probably another three or four bags worth of books.

This leaves us with 2 Billys (no height extenders) full of non-fiction books and another Billy (no height extender) of cookbooks plus another two or three stacks of mostly cookbooks to go through. I’m trying to hold off on doing those because we have no bags to put the discards in but I’m feeling the urge to just do it. And, I know TW is also feeling the urge.

Maybe I can hold off a bit by jumping to magazines, though I’d kind of thought about doing magazines on Friday when I have a day off of work. That would be fun for me to just relax in bed with a huge stack of magazines…

Who knows… I just keep changing my mind, lol.

I’ve changed my mind about the books again.

Last weekend, the little girls went through all of the books that were upstairs in their room and in “Michelle’s room” and that was freaking interesting as hell.

RJ has always been a heavy reader. She’s like her mom and me and always had her nose in a book. Always. She wanted to bring her book to the dinner table. She didn’t want to go anywhere or watch TV, she just wanted to read.

Elly read but not like that. I’ve rarely seen her with a book in her hand unless someone was reading a book to her. Turns out, she’s a sneaky reader.

When we were going through her first shelf of books, she swore that she loved all of her books and they all brought her joy. I found that unlikely because I was pretty sure she hadn’t read most of them. Turns out, we were both wrong.

The third book on her shelf, she wanted to get rid of. And all sorts of books I had no idea she’d read — she had. She’s been a closet reader all her life and I didn’t realize the extent of that reading life until we went through about 500 books.

She’s also very much like me and found it hard to discard books she enjoyed reading. She may never read them again but those books bring her joy — so we kept them.

RJ, on the other hand, discarded almost everything. I had to almost beg her to keep some books that I know she loves. I think she was having trouble with the whole keep the things you love part because she’s also heard her parents talk about not storing her stuff in our homes after she’s grown. I thought she understood that while WE (at least) won’t store every piece of crap in her room, we will absolutely store the things she truly loves if she isn’t able to take them with her immediately. But no, I don’t think she grokked that.

So upstairs there are piles and piles of books to discard. I took one bag to the Friends of the Library this week (adult books that were upstairs) but the majority of those books are children’s books. We’d rather donate them to Bernie’s Book Bank and I don’t really want to have to try and just take a couple of bags any time we might drive down the closest drop-off spot. Instead, I’d like to just load up the car and take them all to the main drop-off location and get it done.

So, that’s my new plan. TW and I will go through just the children’s books this weekend and next week when we go to the Navy base, we’ll swing past the donation point on the way.

And, once we finish children’s books, we’ll move to magazines and then we’ll jump to paper while also looking for joy among the adult book shelves over the next month or two.

I’m hoping we have clothes, books, paper and dvds/cds/videos completely done by the end of July… I think we can do it.