I’ve sat down and started to wrap up the story of this library too many times to count. I literally have written thousands of words about the process and never hit publish on most of them. I’m having trouble sharing it for some reason and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s a hard space to photograph and get the feel of it totally. Or that no rooms in my house are ever really “finished.” Or maybe I’m not over how it fought me so hard on many levels. Or maybe it’s difficult to tell the story about how this tiny room changed the way I look at our whole house, but today is the day I try.
You see, this started out as a space to solve a problem. It was supposed to house all our books in one place… as a library does. While I love to read and have some books I’ll never part with, it as more for homeschool purposes. We’re unofficially/unintentionally a little Charlotte Mason heavy and we have been blessed to inherit two large family’s homeschool curriculum libraries when they transitioned to other schooling options (and we’re happy to share! Let know if you need something!) I needed everything where we could see and use it. I accomplished this pretty easily and managed to write about the process of getting there but couldn’t describe the rest.
While the room functioned when I figured out the organization, it didn’t come alive until I added the finishing touches. It fought me so hard on the organization. I stalled. I organized and reorganized. In all honesty, more shelves could have solved some of the problems I encountered but I was working with what I had and this is how many shelves I had MDF for so here we are. When I finally edited properly, everything changed.
Part of the “all the books in one place” uncovered other things that needed “sorting out.” I had a “few” boxes here and there of artwork we never found a home for when we moved SEVEN YEARS AGO. Not only does this house feel different than our last, but it’s more open and the scale is different so some things never found a new home and I may have forgotten about others. But I started taking inventory of my old collection and I found that I still loved these pieces. They’re real art (at least real prints; that counts and we’re going to unpack this more soon) that mean something. My mama told me years ago to get “art” of some sort every place I travel and I had those pieces from the MoMA in New York; local artist work from Seattle, Chattanooga, New York and small town Kentucky; my favorite picture I’ve ever taken on my first trip to Chicago (on real 35mm black and white film); vintage art that was my mama’s she had framed for Tripp’s nursery… just these few pieces made my heart so happy I knew they needed a home so are we are. The art changed everything.
The art really changed me. It changed the way I see things. It changed what I wanted to see. I may be a crazy person but I even started re-watching every.single.episode of Home Town because Erin Napier is the queen of this. I took note of her placement and frame choices and colors… all of it.
In a world of mass produced, copy+paste design, this is the secret to magic. We’ll dig into this more later, but it all started in the tiniest room of our house that that I redid for $0. If I had a bigger budget (or budget at all) I would have most likely done things differently and it probably would have come together more easily and faster. But I also may have never opened those boxes and thought “let’s just see how this might look.” And I may have never discovered that the real difference is not big budgets or even getting everything right.. it’s about choices that make your heart happy and that you feel in your bones are right for that space.
And I don’t think I’m done. I keep thinking about few other things I want represented in here. This little library might end up looking like that old lady who wears all the colors at the same time, about 19 too many pieces of jewelry (but they’re all her favorites) and always bright red lipstick and I’m here for it… let’s just see what else it might spark
PS I’m not being dramatic. This room was really a “If you give a mouse a cookie” type project. Not only did it open be up to different art and color choices, it also was the catalyst to clean out the worst spot in our home and really consider the pieces I value most. I might have a few other things to share from this room and other projects it inspired.
