#Declutter books how to

Give your books room to breathe, add a small bit of decor in the open spaces (or leave them totally open if you prefer), and you’ll immediately notice your bookshelf looks less cluttered and more styled.

The best way is to leave some open space on the bookshelf. How do you make a bookshelf look less cluttered? I love having classics accessible for my husband and I to read, and as our kids grow, I want to make these books which have stood the test of time accessible for them to read, as well. ClassicsĪgain, these books are often easy to get a hold of, so there’s a case to be made for getting rid of them and just checking them out from the library when you want to read them, but my personal preference is to own them. Even if they are books you can easily get a hold of at a library, there’s just something about having your own copy with your own underlining and notes in the margins. I think books like this are well worth keeping. I have books that are so good I go back and re-read them again every 3-5 years or so. And yes, in the age of Google, we can find practically anything with a quick search on our phones, but for some topics, there’s just nothing like a good old fashioned hard copy book filled with solid information. These are books you go back to for an in-depth look at certain subjects. Below are the three types of books I decided to keep.

This is often the hardest part, isn’t it? Deciding if you like a book enough to keep it on your shelf.

#Declutter books how to

Once I’d gone through the two steps above, the final step in looking at how to declutter bookshelves was to decide what I still wanted to keep from what remained. This freed up space and took care of a lot of what had been making the bookshelves look so overstuffed and messy. It was an easy choice to remove the CDs and put aside the photo albums and prints to go with the rest of our photo albums that we keep stored in the living room. I noticed we had stacks of CDs on the bookshelves, as well as several photo albums and a cluttered mess of photos we printed to put into our kids’ baby books which haven’t quite gotten there yet (real life, right?). When looking at how to declutter bookshelves, some decisions are easy once you’re into the process. We all have those certain books we return to again and again, the ones we treasure, so set those aside in a pile and start on a positive note with focusing on what you want to keep. It is much easier to start with selecting what you love, rather than just randomly starting to pick up books and determine if you like them enough to keep them.

Pull all the books off the shelf you know you want to keep. How do you make a bookshelf look less cluttered?.