Declutter Kids' Rooms Part 5 Bookshelves

Here’s the last of the series of “Declutter Kids Rooms” Part 5: Bookshelves.

Bookshelves tend to be forgotten in the house when it comes to organizing. Many people don’t pay much attention to bookshelves unless they are overflowing. Even if there are old books that you may never pick up to read in the future, many people don’t bother to go through all the books they own to determine if they will keep them or not.

Reality of Organizing Bookshelves For Expats

We move every 2 to 3 years on average. Therefore, we’re faced with packing and unpacking our books at each relocation. Well, mostly me. Not to mention paying a big sum of money that goes into shipping all of our belongings at each move. I consider shipping unnecessary items overseas as a waste of money, energy and resource. Thus, my goal is to ship only the books that we want to keep in our house at every move.

We go through our bookcases once every few years. Especially with children’s books, it is necessary to go through every couple of years because children grow out of books constantly. It’s better for books to be passed down to other kids who can appreciate them as opposed to sitting in a bookshelf and collecting dust.

Organizing Kids Bookshelves

If you’d like to sort and organize your kids’ bookcase, here are some tips.

1. Get all the books out of your bookcase(s).

2. Create a pile with books that your kids have grown out. Those are the books that are too young for your child’s age.

3. Pull out the books that your child is no longer interested and put them in a discard pile.

4. Go through the books that your kids have grown out. If you do not want to get rid of some of them because of sentimental values (gifts from your families), maybe you can bring them back to the keep pile.

I find it helpful to keep in mind KonMari method when it comes to decluttering bookcases. Know whether the books you keep bring you joy or not. Try to remove any emotional attachment to the books. You don’t need to feel any guilt to get rid of books. Books are happier to find home with kids who will read them.

About Book Recycling

I find kids books tough to recycle unless they are in a very good condition. If a book is damaged, it should be tossed. Books with missing pages, with kids’ drawings, or torn pages, are unfortunately not ideal to give away.

We have sold gently used books at garage sales in the past. Since we can’t have a garage sale due to the COVID-19 situation (at least for us in Manila), I gave away our books a couple of months ago. It feels rewarding to know that other kids can make use of our books.

In case you declutter your bookshelves, I highly recommend that you donate your books that are still in good condition to libraries, community centers, or friends.

Below are photos of our adult bookcases. We used to store more books than the bookshelves could hold. It didn’t look great. Therefore, I decided to tidy up and followed some advice by Marie Kondo.

Before

After

How I organize our bookshelves

1. Make piles
Create 1. Yes pile, 2. Maybe pile and 3. No pile.

1. Sort books by genres
Make piles of keeper books based on genres: Fiction, non-fiction, biography & autobiography, politics, history, geographical area studies, photos, languages.

3. Group together books based on sizes
Gather the books in the same genres, put together books with the same height and thickness on the same shelf.

4. Bookshelf styling
Styling a bookshelf with a few decorative pieces makes bookshelves look styled and interesting compared to those with only books. What do you think?

Before 1