One of the things that I’ve been working toward is throwing out what’s not needed and organizing what’s left behind.  You might look at these photos and think I still need to throw out a lot more stuff.  But truthfully, I HAVE thrown out or donated a lot of things.  Most of what you see here is necessary — at least it is to me.

I was very happy to have recently scored the desk and two bookcases shown in the top two photos on VarageSale.  We are book people, and we’re not talking “only fiction” or “reference” or whatever.  We love almost anything that can be printed and bound between two covers.  We dabble in “ebooks” from time to time for convenience’s sake, but we’ll never give up our beautiful book collection.

If you look at the upper left-hand photo, there is a bookcase on the left that I got at IKEA a number of years ago.  It’s solid wood and the shelves are supposed to hold up to 77 lbs.  This was a huge selling point for me, because I didn’t want the shelves to sag over time.  That bookcase holds my cookbook collection, as well as a number of stitchery books (mostly cross stitch).  The cabinet below holds some crafting supplies.

And you can see in the lower left-hand photo an identical bookcase on the other side of the window that holds some of my favorite history and literature textbooks from college on the upper shelves.  Below them are some storage cases holding photographs that are organized, but need to be put in albums.  In the cabinet below I store scrapbooking magazines and idea books.

But I digress from my VarageSale score.  The desk and two bookcases visible in the upper righthand photo — I was able to buy them for $135 last week and, while they aren’t super high-end pieces, they are solid wood and pretty well made, as long as I keep their limitations in mind.  (The drawers are stapled, not dovetailed, so I’m thinking it wouldn’t be wise to load them down with too much weight.)  Now that I’ve gotten them semi-organized and know for certain that they will serve my purposes, I plan to paint them and replace the drawer knobs on the desk with something a little more my style (the current “frogs” are NOT my style — amphibians weird me out).

The hutch above the desk has all my business materials (client files, pricing binders for calculating quotes).  The bookcase immediately by the desk has:  Shelf #1 – Photography references; Shelf #2 – Writing magazines, rough drafts of my novel, critiques; Shelf #3 – Office supplies; Shelf #4 – Old novels that belonged to my grandmother; Shelf #5 – High school and college yearbooks.

The second bookcase needs three shelves cut and then I will do a little fine-tuning of my organizational efforts.  Over all, I think my purchase is really going to help me with organization and time management, since I won’t be searching for things that are scattered all over the place.