Bye, bye books

Well, a decent portion of them.

Many of my bloggy pals are book-aholics, as so many Christians, homeschoolers and lovers of learning are, and they are posting wonderful pics of their home libraries as they grow.  I see enviable shelves, rooms even, with neat rows of books sorted into their many and varied subject areas.  I know it was a vague dream of mine in the past as well, but I have shrugged that one off completely now. (All sigh and groan with me together!)

One can dream!

I've had another enormous cull.
Refer to this post to the last big cull about two oops three years ago. Three years!  How could could over a thousand days have passed sooooo quickly?

I haven't taken before and after photos this time.  The house in general, and the school room in particular, has become totally chaotic.  The family have been living here for almost two years now and with so many little people in the house everything has had to be put "up".  Well, we only have a limited amount of "up" in this place.  Something has to be done!

ALL of the boxed books from the last clean out have gone to Life Line.  I am sorry I did not read my old post and the comments before I did this as I may have passed some things along to other, more tragic, book lovers :-) Yes, the World Book has gone.  The Child Craft books have gone.  Many of the novels have gone.  I had to make ruthless choices, disposing of many,. many novels, general knowledge and interest books. 

With my two remaining schoolies being non-readers, I was able to selectively keep the books I plan or at least hope to use over the next four years.  I also allowed myself the luxury of a few old friends like Norah, Laura and Mabel.

Of course, this school area has a lot of "schoolie" stuff as well. With all the space I have been able to move some of my devotional and Christian Biographies onto those shelves. ( Does one house need three copies of Pilgrims Progress? Just wondering?) We have never had all our books stored in one area.

I have found the book shelves scattered in several rooms of our house are constantly on the grandchildrens' hit list of places to raid.  We do not have the luxury of being able to close off ANY rooms in our house other than the bathroom,/toilet.  Not a good place for book storage :-)

Thus we loaded the Tarago to the max last week and delivered eight boxes of books, 5 garbage bags of clothing (mainly baby from my daughter's twins) and a few of her baby accessories that we were storing in double! It was liberating!

This coming week I hope to do the other book shelves but this is a tidy and not a throw out.  Hubby and I can not bear to throw out Christian Classics.  And I will be keeping my poetry books.  These two categories will grow, I know.

The receptacles for picture books and young childrens' stories are in constant use. I feel a little sad that some of the beloved titles of my own children, which we have kept so carefully, are now rather dog-eared.  Still, I am very pleased to see my grandchildren loving them the way their mothers did, their grandmother, and my own mother.

The rest of the house is preparing for similar treatment!  Every cupboard I hope by end of the holidays.  The heat conspires against me by sapping all of my energy but this is my plan at present.

I envisage a house with somewhat less disorganisation.  It does not fix up the poor old structure, nor does it clean it......That is another story. Perhaps it will give us a little more space to work with.

Have a great weekend.  We have a few more days of schooling to complete before we end 2012.  Wooweeee.....

What are your holiday plans.  Travelling? Relaxing? Cleaning? Blogging?

"Whatsoever your hand findeth to do, do it with your might"



School Room Blitz

This week I am blitzing the dreaded school room!

Pop over to Organized Everyday to learn more about blitzing.

I chose to blitz for one hour each day this week to conquer this little project.

Imagine 17 years of accumulated books, resource materials, white boards, puzzles, books, pens, pencils, folders, blocks, phonics cards, books, wall charts, catalogues, atlases, encyclopedia, rubbers, books, rulers, staplers, blue tack, books, sticky tape, glue, nature displays, art work, books......

That's just a micro list!

Of course, this area gets straightened up each Friday. It gets tidied every holidays.

But it is many years since we actually got rid of anything from this room!

Now don't panic (talking to you Jeanne :-) I am not intending to throw away, as in a rubbish bin, any good, usable books. I have however, packed up several boxes of encyclopedias. This set of late 1960s World Book were given to us almost 20 years ago. It is a beautiful set, with the full set of Childcraft Books as well. Of course , we Google everything these days and these are very out of date.

Any readers collect this sort of thing? Will they one day become collectables? I think we will pass them along to Life Line as they have a big book sale every year.

The set at the top are Harvard Classics. They have so many all time Classics I cann0t part with them, even though they may not be read any time soon.

Over the years, I have saved every scrap of material which I thought might one day be useful, and much of it has been, but realistically, we are not using a lot of it and probably never will. This includes one off texts from curriculum and many kind donations.

I have also saved almost all of the children's workbooks and exercise books. That's a lot of trees stored in that one room! So, putting sentimentality aside I have turfed it all out except for a few treasured pieces . :-(

The boys have been enrolled with Groves School of Distance Ed for a couple of years now, so I do not need to keep all their work for any legal reason. The girls have long since left the school room behind and they certainly don't want to have to store it all at their places.

I have kept all the children's books, of course. I am still reading plenty with my big boys, and love to read to the little grandies when they come. Reading with Grandma is a special memory my kids have of my mother and I'm enjoying building that memory for my little boys.

My (step) grand daughter will get the benefit of all the girlie, horsey, farmie, Little House, Anne of ... and Mabel O'Dell type books which my daughters loved but big boys find are not to their taste.
Will try to post about some of the poetry books I unearthed soon.

So Far, So Good...

I have pretty much stuck to the plan. I managed 2 bags of clothes to a charity shop and one of hand-me-downs to friends, plus a large box of rubbish went out. I am amazed how much stuff had accumulated that has never been used or will never be used. Also, one of the cupboards had some stuff belonging to my girls so I was able to disperse that as well. (3 years after they moved out of home:0)

Mostly ironing and mending related stuff.

Please note as a bonus I have almost emptied the ironing basket!

This before pic doesn't do justice to the rubbish that had accumulated here! and the after has some scrapbooks which we were looking at.

Now a confession... I am probably a bit behind on some of my other regular jobs! Saturday is my usual day for this so hopefully I will catch up.

A Blitz at Mumma's Place

On her wonderfully motivating and informative blog, Organized Everyday, Organizing Mommy has a great Friday Blitz segment. I haven't joined this blitz as I don't find Fridays a good day for major housework ( okay, confession no.1...no day is actually good for house work!) but I like her idea of using hour blitzes.

My own pattern has been major jobs take a major day, or when time is stretched, or I am, I use the half hour method. ( I originally read about that in a Terry Maxwell time management book some years ago.) It makes sense for me to work in short bursts and do a job over a couple of days. This week it's been my linen cupboard (2 sessions) and the computer area (1 session).

Identify the problem:

Like Organizing Mommy, I have a very untidy and unorganized photo and scrapbook supplies area. My aim is to organize photos into years and/ or categories ready for scrapping, organize scrapping supplies and store in usable spaces. De junk and tidy the other things in that area which are stored clothing, ironing and surplus books and board games. (We have very limited storage so a lot of stuff in the one area.)

Plan for week 1:

1. The ironing area

2. The stored clothes (x2)

3. The cupboard (x2)

4. Take give aways to charity and throw outs to bin

5. The work station (x2)

Plan for week 2:

1. Sort photos (who knows how many sessions this will take!)

Plan for week 3:

1. Organize scrapping supplies (x4)

2. Organize Family History information (x4)

Start date: Monday 8 June, 2009 Finish date: Friday 26 June 2009

Using half hour time slots but hopefully more than one per day. Our holiday break begins on 27 June so, Lord willing, I can be at finished the tidy up by then.

We have a sisters scrap planned for Thursday 9 July to make an album for my mother's 80th birthday which is coming in September, so that's a good incentive. And my usual group of friends will probably also plan a day some time over the break.

I have taken a couple of before pics but I think putting them on will be a lot of pressure/ humiliation. I'll maybe post them if the after photos are noticeably better!