Update on the Library Project

I spent a big chunk of this afternoon working on the library project. Here’s what’s gone on so far….

All of the fiction books were moved out of the main library and were relocated to a bookcase in our living room. It’s true. W.E.B. Griffin has been banished. The baseball books were also moved to the same bookcase. That opened up a 7 foot tall x 3 foot wide bookcase that had been completely full with fiction books.

I moved two bookcases that had been in my office home and put them in front of the closet in the library (the closet really doesn’t get used for much of anything, so it’s not a big loss), and moved all of the non-Civil War nonfiction books into them and into the bookcase previously occupied by the fiction books. Those three bookcases are pretty much completely full.

The rest of the room consists of a single, free-standing 7 foot tall x 3 foot wide bookcase and 24 linear feet of built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases that pretty much fill up two walls of the room. Because the ceiling in that room is 7 feet and not 8, spacing has always been a little funky in the built-in’s. In addition, oversize books have always taken up a lot of space in those bookcases. Susan, who really has an engineer’s eye, figured out that if she re-drilled some of the holes in the built-in’s, she could gain a number of additional shelves for me to use. By doing that, she has gained five shelves worth of space for me.

Since Susan has finished that portion of the project, I started working the new books in today. I actually made pretty good progress today–I worked in all of the new biographies and all of the new campaign books, all of which filled the four additional shelves on the left side of the built-in’s. I have plenty of room left to work in the rest of the new stuff, which consists of four categories: cavalry books, unit histories, non-cavalry soldier letters and reminiscences, and miscellaneous. There are probably more new cavalry books and unit histories than anything else, so working them in will take the most space. However, these four categories will take the least time, but I am sure that they will fill up whatever’s left in the way of open shelf space, and I’m really not sure what I’m going to do with the oversize books. So, the upshot is that while there is enough shelf space to accommodate everything THIS time, there definitely will not be next time. And that’s when we’re really going to have a problem.

Once the shelving project is complete, I will take a couple of photos of the room and will post them here so you can get a sense of what I’m talking about.