For those that follow(ed) me on BookLikes, you know that about 6 months ago, MT and I embarked on a home improvement project, turning my ‘library’, ie the room with a few book cases in it and not much else, into a full fledged floor-to-ceiling shelves LIBRARY. We had acres of solid wood we salvaged from MT’s new office space, a former sushi bar, and between us we have acres and acres of books.
The room originally looked like this:
You can see the books stacked on top of the cases, and I’d bi-leveled the shelves themselves by building mini shelf inserts. We’d also purchased a few vertical book spines over time, as well as building shelves on top of our wardrobes (we have tall ceilings).
The (90%) finished, new and improved, library:
Excuse the bad lighting; I say it’s 90% finished because I still need better lighting, and there *is* a fourth wall, with a desk on it, and we still have some wood left, but at the moment, with me working from home, I have two large monitors hogging up most of the space. Once I can start working from my offices again, and I’m down to one computer, I’ll have a better idea where those shelves should be placed – and likely those shelves will serve several masters, not just books (business binders, etc). So, for all intents and purposes, it’s done. Though now I need to find a ladder to reach those high shelves!
Notice the nice generous gaps I left for future growth? All my fiction is on these shelves; we really wanted to keep some of the old bookcases, so we made some compromises in other parts of the house to fit them in – not ideal, but pretty ok – and they are housing my non-fiction and some of MT’s fiction (he wanted to maintain our above-wardrobe shelving for his less-active authors), as well as my TBR books.
I don’t have to tell anyone reading this how big a difference it makes to have room for the books you own. We can see our floors again, and without stacks of books everywhere, I feel like I can breath again; clutter makes me anxious, and with everything else going on, it was almost the straw that broke the camel’s back. With everything tidy again, I find myself enjoying my books and reading much more than I did 3, 4 or 6 months ago. I’m even eyeing new book purchases, though I’ll likely wait a bit longer for things to stabilise pandemic wise, when the Aussie dollar will hopefully find its way out of the sewer.
Wow. That looks amazing! And ‘Lito seems to enjoy it already, too.
Thanks! The cats spend more time in here now and I do too. The lighting still sucks, but that will get fixed, and of course, I’ll fiddle with things here and there, but that will be the fun bit. 🙂
Hurrah! Seriously, that looks awesome.
Thanks Tannat – we’re incredibly happy with the results; when I finally get the lights put in and find a ladder, I may never leave the room. 🙂
That is one seriously impressive home library …!
It didn’t come out too badly – I still walk in and think, wow … please don’t pull down the walls. 😀
So, it looks like I have to fill in the required fields each time I’d want to comment. Does this happen for everyone else? I know some sites have the option to keep that info kicking around and that it is up to the blogger to decide if they want that option or not.
Library is looking GOOOOOOD! 😀
Ok, that’s a weirdness; your comments are auto-approved each time, so it obviously recognises you. I’ll have to go back to see if I missed a setting somewhere (whic is incredibly likely). Thanks for bringing this to my attention; I wonder if anyone else is having to do the same thing?
and Thanks! 🙂
Just the love way this project turned out! Wishing you much tranquility in your new hidey-hole –and many more books to fill in the gaps.
Thanks Peregrinations! It’s good to see you. 🙂
Two other comment related things:
I can’t reply to your replies (my guess is you have your comment thread limit set to 2) and I’m not notified in my wordpress notification bell area.
Which is pretty normal for those outside the dotcom umbrella and the reason I won’t go self hosted 😀 Thanks for putting up with me experimenting.
No problem! I’m happy to play ginea pig – and I’m getting a lot out of it too! Thank you for helping me fine-tune my settings. I know exactly where that limit=2 setting is, as I just saw it yesterday, so I’ll fix that up asap.
Ok, I’ve increased the comment thread limit to 10, and I’ve enabled something about cookies that looks like you might be able to accept a cookie that will keep you from having to fill stuff in everytime you comment. It’s the only thing I can see that might be related. Hope it works.
Ok, I can confirm the threaded comments level is working. I can reply. Now to see if it keeps my info once I add it. The option to save my comment is there and I have clicked it.
fingers crossed
and info is saved!
Now just to figure out if there is a way to get notified so I don’t have to manually check the posts I comment on.
Hurrah! I’m so glad that worked – I don’t need more reasons to dislike WP’s clunkiness.
Do you use the WP reader app? I have it on my desktop, and it gives me instant notifications of – I think – everything. I think the reader on the web browser did too, but it had a tendency to error out a lot.
I use the reader online. So far, no notifications of anything related to your site. Not even when I liked my own comment, just as a test.
Weird – I understood the allure of the WP reader was that you could get notifications and stuff from non-.com blogs.
I’ve been reading up on this because I’m intrigued – I don’t know what OS/browser you use, but if there’s a setting for preventing cross-site tracking, that might be stopping the notifications, as apparently it keeps .org from recognising that your logged into .com and vice versa. It might also be a privacy plug in at work, having the same effect.
I’m using chrome and I just checked and I changed a setting to allow notifications from this site. We’ll see if that changes anything.
and it doesn’t seem to have affected anything. I am running adblockplus and ublockOrigin but that is about it.
Bummer. I don’t know anything about uBlockOrigin, but would it be keeping the .com site from sending your login status (or whatever it is) to .org?
and I am not blocking cross-site tracking.
Oops – nevermind. I responded to the first comment without seeing the second one. 🙂
Well, I turned off ublock, but it “shouldn’t” have the effect of me not being notified. Oh well. What is happening here is exactly why I don’t think I’ll ever go self-hosted. Even when things should work, they don’t, sigh…