A not-so-long shelf life – my bookshelves then vs. now

Way back in the day, before I moved to the U.S., I was already an avid reader. The only bookshelf I owned was a very narrow shelf, that couldn’t even fit an entire series on one shelf. I did however, have a little ledge that ran across two of my bedroom walls, that could fit my books perfectly! I thought I had a lot of books back then, because this little ledge was FULL.

Five years later I realize how wrong I was…

I don’t have any pictures of what this looked like (mainly because I could for the life of me not clean my room enough that I would WANT to take a picture), but luckily I do have a few pictures from my shelves throughout the last four years.

My first big bookshelf

When we moved to the U.S., I finally had room in my bedroom to have an actual bookshelf that could fit all my books. This picture is absolutely horrible, but it’s unfortunately the only one I have. In my defense, I was still two years away from creating my bookstagram, and didn’t know a thing about taking decent pictures, haha!

But as you can see these shelves filled up pretty quickly… Unfortunately, I did not have the room for another bookshelf, so I had to clear out a lot of junk I still had in other closets (if you’ve read my “decluttering 101 post, you’ll know that I had a LOT of useless junk).

Impromptu bookshelf

This big closet used to have two drawers in the bottom, and as you can see, the two doors in the top hadn’t been taken off yet, but this is what I used as a second bookshelf. For some reason my books are double stacked here, and I can’t remember if that’s because my other shelves were still full, or if I planned ahead and knew this one would be full in no time too…

At this point, my entire room was a mess of mismatched furniture and (still) a lot of useless junk, and I felt it was time to move on from that. I don’t own a single closet from that time now; everything I own now is new. Including my current bookshelves!

Time for new shelves.. again!

And this is what my shelves looked like when I just got my new ones! Look at all that empty space! Before this, I had to really stuff my books in my makeshift shelves, so again, I thought I had so many books. And again, I was so wrong. This is also when I started my bookstagram, because I finally had pretty shelves to show off!

These are my current shelves, but obviously they went through a few transformations… I’ve had them rainbow, I’ve had them alphabetical, and I’ve had them randomly placed. They’re now starting to fill up though… I only have one empty shelf left!!

The current state of my shelves

With the exception of a couple of books I bought since then, this is the current state of my shelves! I’m still very happy with how they look, but I’m going to have to figure something out soon when that last shelf fills up…

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