Books and bookcases for decoration

This mornings weather is perfect for curling up with a good book. I have woken up to a wet looking Sunday and just want to grab a coffee and book and spend time in rooms like these....

I would love to have a room with bookcases covering one wall. I also love the colour books add to the room and I personally not only have a number of bookcases around my house but have piles of books too as decoration.

I am hoping though that the weather fines up as I have a fence to paint today. We got a new back fence put in early in the week and as the posts are untreated needs to be painted quick smart (photos soon).

Also just as an aside, I am now on Pinterest (see icon in sidebar) and I have 'pinned' a couple of bookcase photos there too. I am loving it as a great way to collect images for inspiration.

Hope you are having a great weekend.

G

Shoes and bags - where do you put them?

What do you do with your shoes and bags when you come into your house? Is your place a shoes off kind of home?

Ok this is a post that says a little something about me which some of you may go, don't be so precious but here goes...

My house is a no shoe zone, has been for a while and since we have had the boards sanded and polished recently we are even more hot on it.

Of course this means my kids are well trained on this particular thing to the point of going into anyones house will immediately take shoes off. The issue I am facing at the moment is getting others to do the same. Some friends and family do easily but others need constant reminding to the point where it is getting uncomfortable. Would it be bad to put a sign in the hall saying Welcome - take shoes off here! - maybe a suggestion for one of you lovely graphic designers to do a print?


And then there is bags, now of course these are allowed in the house but the issue I have is where to put them? I am finding most people walk down the hall into the kitchen and drop them onto the central kitchen island bench. For some reason this gets to me, probably because it is my main food prep area (I like it to be clear). Or the put them on my lovely sideboard, pictured above and this I don't like much either. But I can't bring myself to ask them to put them in the nearby bookcase where I have a vacant shelf. My family who I can ask to move bags just look at me like I am a little mad!

So is there where you are going to tell am I am a little over the top? Maybe but even though I like these two things to be neater I do not run a minimalist, sterile house by any means. I love photos and kids stuff and things from our travels around the place, plus a big fan of bookcases.

So any suggestions? Do you have any house pet hates yourself?

Love for bookcases - storage with style

I am now in packing mode getting ready for the builders to start in a few weeks and our bookcases are one of the first things I have started to pack as we have quite a few.

Packing up our books and seeing the emptiness left behind has made me realise that bookcases really are a feature in our house - they provide a wall of colour against our white walls adding character and warmth to the room.

I love how they reflect our families personality and style, housing our books, pictures, ornaments we have collected on our travels and different things my daughter has made.

They also provide what I call ‘storage with style’. Ours are filled with coloured boxes containing CDs and cane baskets filled with toys (you can buy all those pictured from IKEA). Not only do the baskets look great but my kids love them. Maybe I am just lucky but both my kids enjoy sorting through the baskets (they are just the right size for them) and then putting the toys back in them at the end.

The issue with bookcases though is if they get too untidy they don’t look that great. In my case I haven’t seen keeping them tidy as a chore (packing them up is though). The way I look at it is by swapping over ornaments, changing photos and other things you can give the room a little easy design re-fresh. Also if you are an avid reader like me it is great to pull books out and reorder just to remind yourself what you have.

The bookcase itself can also add a ‘style’ to a room. In our family room I love the warmth that our large bookcase made of recycled timber provides. Whereas the simple white bookcases in our lounge frame our white art deco fireplace really well. Our smaller bookcase in the hall acts as great storage for shoes and for displaying things on top to act as a nice welcome into the house.

My dream with the extension is to have a wall of bookcases in the new family area. I can’t wait to do this and restock our existing bookcases once the dust settles.

The toy invasion - how do you deal with it in the home

Toys and stuff that goes with children are everywhere in my house. As my husband says the soft toys are like gremlins, they just seem to multiply over night. We need more storage and joke that we are doing our house extension just so we can fit everything.

The problem with me is I am one of these people that hates clutter, I like things to be tidy and am passionate (or as some might say obsessed) about interior design and rooms being 'just so'. I have to admit I actually get a little stressed if things are a mess and look disorganised. Now I am not a minimalist, I love a house to have warmth and character and express the family’s personality, just in an organised way, so wanted storage options that also add to the style of the room. The other thing I am concerned about is the environment and so always feel a bit funny about the amount of plastic toys the kids get given.

After my first I managed to keep things tidy organised and clean, with just one we could store most of the toys in her bedroom which we can't do now with the two in the one bedroom (we have a two bedroom house).

So being the neat freak I am have had to work out ways to deal with the toy explosion, both design / storage ideas and with my environmental hat on looking at the reduce, reuse, recycle concept.

Reduce - could say well stop buying so many as lets face it most kids play with it for about two minutes then loose interest, problem is we are not the ones buying them. My kids are the only Grandchildren on both sides of the family and their grandparents love to give them things especially as they live interstate from us so don't see them that often. We are trying to put limits on gifts and get them to buy books or things to make rather then more plastic. The great thing about books too is they have no extra packaging to get rid of.

Reuse - we have joined a toy library, so every three weeks they have different toys to keep them amused. We also often select games or puzzles which take up less space. Have also started the de-clutter of passing toys on that they have grown out of to either friends or charities.

Recycle - not an option for most toys unless you look at it in terms of giving to others as above.

Storage with a design element - as for the rest; storage, storage, storage - that fits in with the style of my rooms and is not an eyesore.

One of the best things I have discovered is small cane baskets from IKEA, they fit well into a standard bookshelf (and one thing I love is having bookshelves around the house, they can add a lot to a room if kept ordered, almost like a feature wall of beautiful things and colour) and in them I can store small things like cars, Little People, train set stuff, tea set. I have also bought larger boxes with beautiful designs (IKEA) and cane baskets that also act as side tables (from Queen Victoria Markets).