Book Storage

Before we had kids, we were the kind of couple who would go out to dinner on a Friday or Saturday night and then spend an hour or two perusing one of many local used bookstores (all have sadly closed now).  We both love books.  We have always had dreams of having a big, thorough library - probably for different reasons, but nonetheless.  We inherited a couple of large solid oak bookcases from my parents and both, at one time, were completely full - and my husband has a third one at his office that is also completely full.  We own a lot of books.  We own a kindle too, and see the convenience of it, but we still have a thing for real books.
Having kids and living in a small space has temporarily dampened our dream of a giant library.  We had to condense down to one bookcase in our dining room.  The rest of the books were either purged or are boxed up in various closets around our place.  Being the purge-queen that I am, I took a very hard look at the books which were mine and got rid of A LOT of them, thinking they would be replaceable easily later on.  My husband, however, monk that he is ordinarily, just couldn't/wouldn't purge his books.  So, someday I hope we will have an office where we can do a whole wall of built-ins. 

So for the last few years, we've had this giant (ugly) bookcase in our dining room.  I sit on the couch and look at it and it has bugged me for a very long time.  It just looked cluttered and didn't match our other decor.  I was also concerned about our younger monkey attempting to climb it.  Last fall I came up with a great plan to fix this wall and all it involved was a fairly cheap trip to Ikea.  I finally got my husband on board when he realized he actually needed the bookshelf-space of that oak bookcase in his office.  Off the kids and I went to Ikea.  I actually was able to fit all the pieces into the trunk of my Jetta.  I was hoping my new solution would offer more storage space, but in the end it stores exactly the same amount of books as before.  At least it looks MUCH better!  Behold: three billy bookcases, two of which we put cabinet doors on.  I wanted to put doors on all three bookcases, but sadly, the billy is rather narrow and some of our larger books needed the space to stick out a little bit.  My favorite thing?  All our movies (mostly kid-movies) are now behind a door and I don't have to look at them.

About the artwork.  Just more proof of how much we love our kids.  We found these prints at a model train show we take our kids to every year.  The artist sets up a booth every year and I fell in love with the colors in that Santa Fe painting last year.  This year we let our older son pick out two more knowing we were going to hang them above our new bookcases.  I also discovered that frames and mats are very cheap through Amazon and the quality is great for the price.