Any Ingenious Book Storage Ideas?

I ordered hidden book shelves from Amazon this week and can't wait for them to arrive! It's the coolest thing - it's an L-shaped bracket the screws into the wall. You secure one old, sturdy book onto the bottom of the "L" and that becomes the base of the shelf, then stack a bunch of books on top. It looks like a stack of books suspended on your wall. I ordered some for my kitchen so that I can get my cookbooks off of the counter:

http://store.dwell.com/umbra-conceal-book-shelf.html?92=3...

Assuming you are past the age where your kids want to "read" the same book every day for weeks on end.

Cull, donate, and rotate, and get a library card. Through grade school, we were allowed to take out 20 books each week (my mother's limit). We had fresh reading material on hand all the time.

Best,
F. B.

We have full size bookcases in both of our kids rooms as well. We did a massive book cleanout and they both chose the books they "loved" to stay on the bottom two shelves (I would say my daughter kept about 20, my son about 25). My husband and I kept and additional 10 or so (mainly seasonal favorites) for the playroom. I paid them 50 cents per book that they parted with (then donated them to my daughters old preschool) and let them use that money to purchase new books. We do the clean out twice a year, usually when the Scholastic Book Fairs as going to their schools. Then they get to use that money to buy new ones.

We also use the library cards and go there every Sunday as a family. Both kids get to check out 10 books at a time, and we keep those in a library basket in the playroom so that they don't get mixed in by accident with the others.

LOL - Your SWH Makes me laugh. My kids are 4 and 6. We keep the library books in the playroom only, so they usually don't escape from there. I also have a box of books stashed away from when they were littles, that I plan to read to their kids when they have them. :)

Milk crates turned on their side.

You can stack them but not if your kids are little.

You can stack them on their sides (easier to see titles) in their bedrooms
in a corner.

Baskets (sometimes I use them for books).

Edit: a piece of plank wood set just above ground in their room suspended on 2 crates.

I have two horizon cases in my kids room. I bought them at target, they are great!

Sounds like our daughter. She loved her books. We went through them every once in a while and weeded out the books she did not really love and I stored them in plastic containers. Eventually I donated those.

There are some picture books that were absolute favorites, so they were kept at her eye level. As she got older we started boxing up books she wanted to keep. Again every once in a while I had edit what she really wanted to keep. The ones she loved at eye level and the ones that were still special up on the higher shelves.

Anyway at this point, she is 24 and we have at least 12 16x16 boxes of her childhood books in storage. and a bookshelf in her room filled with books.

When she comes home for Christmas, We will have her once again edit the books. Again we donate the books she is not keeping.

Each book take us back to when she was the age I read them to her or she read them. They are like dear friends. At some point, we would love to have a library, our Pinterest pages reflect the love of books. She has always said she wants a house filled with books, shelves and shelves of them.

We have literally hundreds of kids books!! Books I've had in my classroom in addition to all of my kids' books. That doesn't even count library books. Both kids and I have book addictions. It's a serious problem.

We have various baskets and crates of different sizes around the house that hold books. Mostly plastic ones from dollar stores. There are probably 8-10 in our living room alone. Our coffee table has a shelf on the bottom of it where books are stacked. We have a side table with a bottom shelf that holds books. We have an antique apple box sitting on its side filled with books and baskets of books on top. We have a couple of bedside tables from IKEA that I turned upside down. They are perfect for kids' books and the "feet" keep baskets from sliding off the top. The kids also have a bedside table in their room that has a bottom shelf that holds books. Our guest bedroom has two 3 shelf bookcases that are filled with kids' books. I desperately need more bookshelves. I desperately need a house with a library. I need a 12 step program for my addiction.

Look on Pinterest for book storage ideas. You can find some cute ideas. I know several teachers who have hung rain gutters on the walls in their classroom and used those to hold books.

I would get a kindle for your 6 yo. Until your other kids are older, I agree it is a challenge having so many books. I was thrilled when my youngest outgrew her baby/toddlers books and I was able to donate them to the local library.

For what it is worth, my oldest and youngest have very different taste in books (my oldest liked fantasy and classics my youngest likes historical fiction). I love that they have kindles and can just purchase and electronically store whatever they want.

In my child care facility I set up a hard side child's pool in a corner. I put a ton of throw pillows in it and added a bunch of snuggly blankets too. The lighting was good and the kids loved it.

I put the books the kids could have access to in some 12"X12" cubes, like milk comes in, around the sides of the pool and the kids could dig in them and find their favorite books.

In another classroom we had the corner set up under a big corner shelf. They could pull a curtain across and lay behind it on a mat.

In the school kids classroom we had shallow shelves along the walls around the hard side pool, it was the next to smallest one, and they would crawl in and snuggle up with pillows and blankets then read for hours.

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Here are some links to sort of what I'm talking about.

Hard side kids pool from Walmart.

Almost half way down this gardening site they're planting Wasabi in one. They can be used for above ground gardening and so much more!

http://mountaingardensherbs.com/index.php/2012-year-in-re...

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This site shows sort of what my shelves about the reading nook looked like. These are nicer...mine had plastic fronts and sections. Like you see in some doc's offices.

http://lovelylittlebookworms.blogspot.com/2012/05/creatin...

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The second one down, with the blown up pool, is a lot like the one I had in my own classroom but I'd never put a blow up pool in a child care classroom. They'd have a ton of holes in them each day.

http://www.theclassroomcreative.com/2013/09/classroom-rea...

We have about the same amount of books, and we are trying to work out a storage solution too.
I am thinking of using a spare closet and storing books on shelves in there, then taking out around 30-40 at a time and putting them into kid friendly storage like this:

http://tinyurl.com/nwahg9f

or this:
http://tinyurl.com/nql5fyv

or this:
http://tinyurl.com/n4sajsa

I already store toys and switch them out once every week or two and it's awesome (the kids are super excited to see old toys again and nothing gets ignored for very long).

Do not get a kindle. Our children are on computer and tv screens at school, at play and at home. All of that is havoc on their vision health.

I like the idea of the milk crates for the books that they want to keep and also the idea of garage selling the other books and using the proceeds from selling 15v books to buy 3 new ones.