Space Treat: Books - Love 'Em or Leave 'Em

Every week I meet at least one new client whose treasured book collection has taken over more than it's fair share of space. Sound familiar?

Round 'em up and move 'em out - here's how to go about it:

1. Determine how many shelves you will allocate specifically for your books. Only keep the quantity of books that will fit on these shelves.

2. Get yourself 3 boxes. Put a "donate", "sell" and "recycle" label on each one.

3. Edit: Review the titles on the book's spine and pull out only the ones that you will let go of and keep only the ones you really love. You may have to be ruthless with yourself in order to weed out enough books. As you remove a book put it into the appropriate box.

4. Donate, sell and recycle: Your local library, shelter, community center or charitable location would love to receive your cast-offs. If you want to make some fast cash sell them on half.com or amazon.com. The only catch with taking the "for sale" route is the books have the potential to become yet another procrastinated project. If this tends to be your style, just recognize it and save yourself the trouble by bringing the books directly to donation. Some books like medical, health and computer technology tend to become outdated fast. If you have these genres and they are paper-back, most communities will recycle them along with your other paper like newspapers and cardboard.

Space-tacularly,
Erica
The Spacialist
212.924.4383

Note from One Chic Mama: We just discovered the best site called BookMooch where you give away your unwanted books. In turn, you receive points that you can redeem for books from other readers. So you get to clean out your bookshelf, then add new books (for free) that you'd like to have. The only cost is shipping your books out to other readers. Sounds like a win-win to me!