Everyone Loves a Before and After: Spring Cleaning My Bookish Spaces

My room is a mess; there's no way around it. Ever since I moved home after college, I've made best use of the amplitude of space I've been afforded here, in my childhood home, by absolutely destroying it. 

There's books stacked pretty much everywhere. Clothes to donate haphazardly collected underneath coffee tables, stacks of candy piled on top of the extra cake stands sitting in the middle of my room, and piles and piles of fabric ready for various sewing and embroidery projects quite literally stuffed underneath chairs like I've got something to hide (What I'm actually hiding: the fact that I haven't actually worked on a sewing or embroidery project since before Covid hit). 

More annoyingly, I have junk collected in front of my bookcases. I have four total sets of bookshelves where I keep various kinds of books, and every single one of them comes complete with some kind of impediment to obscure half of the titles from closer inspection. 

There's absolutely nothing right about this, at all. 

So, thanks to the inspiration given by an inundation of Spring Cleaning videos and time lapses on Instagram and YouTube this month, I've got the opportunity to add my own tidying up to the mix. And because I've got a lot of plans for this summer - including Sewing, Reading, and the amplitude of toilet paper rolls and seed packets stacked up haphazardly on the crowded end of my desk - I've finally found the motivation to get it all assembled into some semblance of organized. 

At least this way, I'll maybe have enough room to stop double-stacking all of my bookshelves. 

There are two areas in particular I'm hoping to organize:

#1. The area in front of my TBR, Mystery, and Middle Grade bookshelves. To Do:

• Clean out everything that's been piled there to donate, and, you know. Donate it. 
• Move chair a little ways forward, so you can actually access all of the bookshelves more easily.
• Find a better place for all the wrapping paper and gift stuff, which really doesn't need to be next to your bed, and / or bookcases. Maybe nearer your desk? 
• Amend the lighting situation so it works a little better, maybe by adding an extra lamp? That way, you also might not look like the palest girl in the world on FaceTimes / Zoom meetings. 
• Clean off the coffee table next to your chair so you can actually use it. 
• Figure out where to put the Big Box of Paranormal Romances so it's not just sitting in the way. I don't mind it being out in the open - I've got nothing to hide! - but at least make sure you don't have to worry about shredding part of your ankle on the rough cardboard in the mornings when you open your windows.

#2. The area in front of my other Bookshelves, as well as the Pile of Junk behind my chair, and Further Mess gathered on my desk. To Do: 

• Where are you going to put the sewing stuff??? 
• Clean off the top of the desk so you have more space, so you feel like you can actually work on it again. 
• Consolidate and reorganize all crafting supplies, so as to be better contained in one space. Also, do you really need to keep ALL of the acrylic paint in your room?
• Move all postage / cards / postcards into one condensed location, as if this will actually compel you to follow your gut and starting sending out regular letters to your friends, like you've been meaning to do for the past year in Quarantine
• Honestly, just clear out area underneath the desk, while you're at it. There's a lot of Scrapbooking stuff under there. 
• Move more of the board games into the garage so you don't feel like you're courting death whilst standing in front of your shelves.
• Move chair and coffee table so you can better access the books on the lower shelves of the white bookcase, which will hopefully also be easier to look at now all of the Junk will be moved.

And no matter what I accomplish in both areas, there's one last thing I'm going to have to do to designate each side as clean: go through the titles I have collected there, and see whether there are any I'm interested in donating. 

I'm pretty good with that last bit in regards to my TBR shelves, which I comb through regularly. Thanks to various personal habits - like a regular round of speed-dating my shelves about once a month or two, which I wrote about most recently here and here - I've got some practice un-hauling books I haven't read, that I can still recognize aren't for me. It's getting rid of past reads that I usually have more of a problem with.

But I have to. The situation, as it stands, is untenable: I have four tall bookshelves all around my room, but also no available space to stick new reads. I can read down my TBR shelves, for sure - whether I'm very good at that, is a completely different question - but that won't mean anything if there's no room nearby for me to put them. 

And as a general side note: before you ask why I have so many armchairs and coffee tables all collected in my room, please know that between the long coffee table, two end tables, long couch and two armchairs, they all come courtesy of my Grandma Loretta, who passed in 2015. The original idea was that they'd all simply hang out in there until we could find some additional space to store them - our storage unit is crammed full of holiday decor, and the garage is similarly stuffed - but no one's really moved out and claimed them. (Plus, I now feel very protective of them, and have been known to yell at siblings for mistreating the upholstery / putting shoes on pillows, so no one else has really proved themselves worth of them, either.) 

AFTERMATH

Three weeks, it took me. Three weeks. I've been writing this blogpost since the 6th, and now look at what day it is. Look at how much time has passed. I'd be positively aggravated with myself, if the room didn't look so darn good! 

It's honestly incredible how much more room it feels like I have in here now. Granted, I did move a ton out - Arts and Crafts supplies are now solidly collected downstairs in the laundry room, and all that I keep near my desk are Calligraphy, Scrapbooking, and Journaling stuff - plus I also donated a total of two and a half grocery bags of books, an additional three of which are waiting to make their way towards worthwhile homes, but still. It's positively cavernous in here. 

The desk area is, by far, the most inviting part of it all. Its insane to have this long of a desk, and feel like you're not able to utilize all of it. I also can now access the outlet in the wall, so that should it be necessary, I could actually do something as radical as - gasp! - charge my laptop over here. Can you imagine?

The Sewing Stuff has all been moved, with my sewing machine, to a space tucked in next to my hanging closet. Is it still a lot? Sure. But I found and cleaned off an old plastic set of drawers we had sitting in the garage, and it all fits in there! Well, most of it. There are still a few bags filled with miscellaneous detritus piled up alongside. That's where the Gift Wrap has managed to find a home, too. 

(A brief note: my younger sibling boldly exclaimed, when she saw this new set-up, "You didn't clean, you just moved the mess around!" And while it's true that my Sewing and Gift Wrap leaves... a little to be desired, it's a far, far improvement from what this all looked like before I got started. I've even got the pictures to prove it!) 

On the other side of the room, the sitting area near the window is a much more relaxing place to be, as well. I can easily access all of the books, there's no piles and piles of miscellaneous material cluttering the areas underneath the coffee table, and with the addition of a "new" lamp - rescued from disuse in my parent's room, and given a brand new lampshade to wear - it's honestly much easier to actually read. 

Granted, there is still a little bit of a pile-up near the chair, though nowhere near where it used to be. The Barnes and Noble bag simply holds the contents of tee shirts and sweatshirts ready to be donated back to my sorority, for which I am an alumnae advisor, come the Fall. I'm more than willing to hang onto them for a little while longer, when I know that they'll be headed for such a worthy home. 

And so, my room is finally clean! Ish. Definitely ish, because there's still a ton of junk piled up on my dresser, and I haven't dusted anything - least of all, all these blinds - in, like, over a year. 

But still! I can use all of my bookshelves again, my armchair is ready for reading, and my desk, for writing. I couldn't be more pleased to go into the summer with a personal space ready for holing up in, shutting out the sunlight, and remaining my well-sheltered, hermit crab self. 

Have you made any changes to your space this Spring? What areas of your own have you made into a sort of book nook? Let me know, in the comments below!