More Bookshelves!

It's been over a month since my first house/bookshelf update, so I think it's about time for a follow-up. If you thought nothing else could possibly go wrong (like we did!), that is unfortunately not true. Not to be a Debbie downer, but owning a house can be a real bitch sometimes. Seriously. On the upside, our basement has stayed dry and the sewer has remained clear -- thank God for small miracles! But on the downside...

1. On multiple occasions I have heard the tell-tale buzz of a bee. Cue the panic, heart palpitations, and shrieking. Ugh. I hate bees. I really hate being the only one home to deal with a bee, but such are the hazards of working from home. I know they are good for the environment and all, but they do not belong in my house. They belong outside in the environment, not freaking the living daylights out of me because we are in enclosed quarters together. At least they're not honeybees so I guess I don't have to feel too bad about being a bee-killer.

2. The laundry room has proven to be even more of a disaster than we thought. Not only did we need to run a new hot water line and clean/repair mold damage, but when we went to replace the floor and pulled up the insulation underneath, we found roots and leaves mixed in with the insulation. If you're thinking that roots and leaves on the inside of a house is a bad thing, you would be correct. It is a very bad thing. Turns out the sill and one of the floor joists is rotten and the great outdoors just creeped it's way in. Two months ago, I didn't know what a sill was. Come to think of it, I kind of wish I still didn't! We're getting that fixed this weekend though so the wall doesn't just crumble or collapse on us one day. (I said it's a bitch, didn't I?)

3. And the latest thing we spotted was some mysterious roof damage. Our starting-to-get-old-but-is-totally-fine-for-now roof no longer seems to be totally fine. No leaks yet, but we want to get this figured out before that happens.

It really is amazing how a home in "average condition" with a few issues to be addressed can so quickly start falling apart. It's almost like the house knew the old owners wouldn't bother to fix anything so it held itself together as long as it could and now that we're here, it's breathing a sigh of relief and saying, "I can relax now, these new people will take care of me if I break!" OK now that I am anthropomorphizing my house, I think it's time to move on to the fun stuff...

Despite all this craziness, bookshelves just make me happy. My dad would like to build us some bookcases for the living room, but he's helping us with so many other things (::cough:: fixing the laundry room floor ::cough::), that it's not really on the horizon yet. But I still have a few new photos to share.

First, we have a second cookbook bookcase in the kitchen. Yes, I have more than one bookcase just for cookbooks. (You can see the first one here. I've shuffled things around a bit, but they are still both full.) Ironically, we are so busy with house stuff I am mostly making grilled cheese sandwiches these days, but hopefully some more adventurous recipes will be in my near future.

And then we have matching bookcases in the master bedroom we are using in place of nightstands. We came to this "design" decision for purely practical reasons. Do you have any idea how much nightstands cost at a halfway decent furniture store? Way. Too. Much. They are like half the price of a dresser, but with only a fraction of the storage space. So I asked myself, what do I really need a nightstand for? To hold a lamp, a box of tissues, a cup of water, and a book or two. So swap in short bookcases for nightstands and voila! They can hold all those things plus waaay more than just one or two books. Did I mention that bookcases make me happy?

Also, we really need curtains...

My husband's side has some of "his" books. The Nicholas Flamel series, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Septimus Heap, I Am Number Four, & various Rick Riordan books. Harry Potter and Dan Brown are only there temporarily, because those will definitely be in the living room someday. We'll probably swap those out for the original Percy Jackson series which my aunt is currently borrowing. 

Then there is my side: 

I've used the top shelf for (mostly) review books.

The rest of the top shelf and the entire bottom shelf is dedicated to the non-review books I currently want to read the most. The tip of the TBR iceberg, if you will. It's a mix of new releases, recent acquisitions, next-in-a-series, and books I've chosen for various challenges. My side will definitely get shuffled around a lot more than my husband's!

It may be a while before the rest of our books come out of boxes, but I'm really happy with what we have so far. I'm a little afraid to see how many more bookcases we will need -- by the time this is complete, I really may have my very own library!