If you are anything like us, there is never enough space in the house for everything.
One area of our Mousekatot’s room that was giving us particular trouble was her bookshelf.
Everything was scattered all over the place. Books were mingling with toys, pages were bent and everything would fall off the shelf if you tried to take one book out.
For me, the best way to organize everything is to put it in bins.
We went to our local Dollar Tree and purchased six, soft-sided bins and two tubs to put toys in. (I also had two plastic bins leftover from a previous organizing project.)
I started by taking all of the books off the shelves and organizing them into different categories such as holiday books, Christmas/winter books, Dolly Parton Imagination Library books, etc.
Once I had them in the piles I used the scan feature that comes with the Goodreads app. (If you don’t have a Goodreads account you should sign up for free. It is a website that allows you to review books and create different “shelves” for your books like “to read,”” tear jerkers,” etc.)
The scan feature from this app allows you to scan the barcode of the book and place it on the shelf. For each one of the book boxes I created its own shelf that included the category of the books that were in the box. The only problem with Goodreads is that it doesn’t recognize all barcodes so some of the books will not show up on the “shelf.”
What I plan to do, and I haven’t yet, is to print out the “bookshelf lists” and put them in a binder to easily find a particular book.
So that Lily would be able to find which bin a book is in, I added a cute “Finding Dory” sticker to the front of each box.
For example, if she wants to look at “Goodnight Moon” I can tell her it is in the Hank box and she can easily find it.
So far it seems like the system is really working out. (I forgot to take a before picture to show how bad it really was, but just take my word for it. It was really bad.)
Do you have any projects that you are interested in tacking this summer? Leave a comment below.
Mousekatots 