My New TBR Cart, or the Big Home Decluttering Project

… Part 1.

It started last weekend when I resolved to finally catch up with a few overdue tasks, which — go figure — suddenly also restored at least a semblance of order to my office.  (A colleague with whom I’m working very closely, and who is just about the only person permitted to get away with this sort of comment, had recently — before “social distancing”, of course — wondered aloud, “What happened here?  This used to be an office once …”)

Part of the decluttering of my office involved finally inventing shelf space for all of last (and this) year’s, as-yet unshelved books, a large number of which had taken residence stacked up on my office floor — which in turn, eventually, also went a fair way towards decluttering my living room, where yet-to-be-shelved books had started taking up more and more space in the same manner.  In furtherance of their shelving, a while back I had decided to finally tumble to creating a TBR cart: something I’d so far resisted, because there’s no place in my home where it can have a permanent space, so whenever it’s not actively being consulted, it will have to live wherever it is least in the way at any given time.  But as a temporary expedient, and to whittle things down to a selection of those books I really do want to get to sooner rather than later, it may end up serving very well … and at least, we’re off to an excellent start in that very direction.

As per usual, “decluttering” actually started with yet more clutter, when I piled up all my stacks of unshelved books on my living room floor to then sort them by “audiobook / print edition”, “read / TBR”, genre, etc., in preparation of actually shelving them.

(For the record, this is obviously NOT the way these books had been stored up to then.  In fact, this is a sight so horrible to my eyes that it’s the fastest and best motivator to get me to find proper shelving for my as-yet unshelved books as quickly as possible.)

I decided that in an effort to further prioritize my selection, I would stack my new TBR cart with:

  • A few “comfort watching” DVDs;
  • Audiobooks yet to be listened to (regardless whether I’ve already read the books in question or not); and
  • Print editions of TBR books that I do not also have as audobooks.  Mostly these are books newly acquired in 2019 / early 2020, but I ended up going back to my shelves and pulling a few books from there as well.

And hooray, this way I actually managed to find / create shelf space for all those books not going into the TBR cart, and to stack my cart with a selection of books I’m truly looking forward to reading soon!

Now onwards and upwards to the rest of my apartment … (ah, the things that social distancing makes us do at last!)

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/2112521/my-new-tbr-cart-or-the-big-home-decluttering-project

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