I finally unpacked all our books. A little over a year here in Washington and all our books are now on bookshelves. Organized as well – the books are definitely arranged alphabetically by author, then alphabetically by title for authors we own multiple books of, and obviously the series in order of release.

The reorganization of our book collection was definitely not planned. Well, a little bit planned – since we needed to get extra shelves, I knew I wanted to do it but I just didn’t know when. But with my anxiety on high lately, I needed something to focus on. And the process did help to pull myself out of my head.

So…the process took a few hours. I started around 3 am – I know, crazy but my anxiety doesn’t really pick a time and when it’s on high, I definitely can’t sleep. So I knew the timing was perfect. I was done by about 11 am. Not too bad. I moved the little furniture we have in the living area to make room for the floor sorting. We had a number of books from authors whose last names start with the letters B, S, M and T, which I found weirdly interesting for some unknown reason.

We currently have 5 tall-ish bookshelves against the wall. We got these ones from Ikea to line the wall of the living area. We agreed on not shedding too much money on sturdier bookshelves at this time because we know that this apartment living is something temporary. And I wanted to build a customized bookshelf once we have a permanent living situation. We also decided to get a smaller 12 cube shelf which we got from Amazon to house our smaller paperbacks and mangas.

We do own a number of graphic novels and hardbound books, which are not photographed here. I still yet to organize those. They have shelves of their own, just not organized. That would be for a later time since organizing our paperbacks, fun as it was for me, was very tedious.

One thing I didn’t do though, and I should have, was tally the books. The last count we did was almost 3 years ago, and the total was a little over 5oo books. Our collection definitely grew from that number. I will definitely do the count once I organize the rest of the books. I am also planning on creating a spreadsheet just to catalog the books. So this organizing business is definitely not done.