Sarah's Home Library

We move a lot, not down the street kind of moves but actual pack up the whole house and ship everything across the country endeavors. Moving is challenging and only gets more challenging when you add kids into the mix.

One of the first things I do to make my kids feel at home is to set up their spaces before anything else and unbox our children's books. I always want our home to be a sanctuary for our kids, and having a spot for them to relax and unwind with a beloved book from our home library is one element of that.

Even though the location of our home library changes, I always organize our kids books by color. I like this for two reasons, one I am a very visual person and I like things to be visually appealing and two I think it helps kids who aren't reading yet to put their books back in a spot or to find a book.  Over the years, I have found myself saying things like- I think that's in the blue books or please go put this back with the red books.

Here's an early iteration of our home library which was housed in a playroom.

 Several houses and a few states later, this is our current set up:

Moving always brings organizational challenges, but in our current house our living room is the central room right off of the playroom, our entryway and the kitchen. It also has the most soft seating options, so it quickly became the spot for a good chunk of our home library.  

This console used to have sliding doors on it, but we removed them so that the books were easier for our toddler to get to and put away.

The kids also have a rotating selection of favorite books in their rooms on their own personal bookshelves. My father in law made these shelves for them after I showed him a picture of the shelves sold by book/shop  and the kids and I both love how beautiful and functional they are.

We have their shelves set up next to inviting reading chairs. 

Recently, we installed these pictures ledges as book ledges on a wall in our playroom. I plan on rotating these books out with different themes/seasons and as we get new library books so the kids will easily be able to access "new" picks.

Something I like to do during the summer months, when we are at home more, is get out our play tent and make it a reading tent. I'll set up the tent with comfy pillows and blankets, then get stacks of books for us to read and I'll read as long as the kids want.  Sometimes they want to read for a few minutes, sometimes for an hour, but when the tent is set up I find they will come back to it by themselves throughout the day.