With less than three months left to go (11 weeks if I go to my due date; less if I go early and certainly no more than 12, since my doctor’s office won’t let me get further than 41 weeks), it’s time to kick into gear and get this nursery rolling.  We’ve actually accomplished a couple of things, so I’m behind on these updates – look for more coming soon, because it’s starting to take shape.  But first things first: I have to finish telling you about clearing out the room to get it ready for baby.  When we left off, the room looked like this:

…Folks, I think this qualifies as a federal disaster area, don’t you?  That’s a pile of hand-me-downs from a very generous friend who’s done having kids, there in the foreground.  And in the background, the source of my angst: my bookshelves, laden with books and needing a home.

I burned off some of my angst by whining about the bookshelves here.  My concern was mainly that the bookshelves didn’t really match most of my other furniture, but I didn’t want to spend the money on new ones.  (I have someone SO cute to buy things for, and she’ll be here before I know it!  Why spend money on bookshelves when I could spend money on spoiling my baby?)  I brainstormed a few ideas, poked holes in each of them (in law practice, we call that “setting up the straw man and knocking him down”) and then consoled myself by spending hours browsing online for baby clothes.

After sleeping on it for a few nights weeks, I finally decided upon my least-of-many-evils solution: I moved the TV and stand to storage in the basement.  After all: (1) no one was watching it in the guest room, since I lost the remote; (2) people keep televisions in their basements all the time; and (3) on the off chance we have another flood, the TV will be well out of harm’s way, since it’s still sitting on its stand about two feet above where the water rose last time.  Plus, I need to be less sentimental about certain possessions.  The fact that my grandparents gave me the cash to buy this TV at Wal-Mart does not imbue the TV with some special meaning.  The same grandparents have given me far more meaningful gifts – like an early edition of Jane Eyre, which my grandmother pressed on me when I mentioned offhand that it’s my favorite book.  Those are the gifts to cherish – a TV is just a TV.

Once the TV was gone, in went the bookshelves.

I took the opportunity to cull my collection a little bit, moving the books I didn’t really want out into storage, and I was able to neaten up the bookshelves quite a bit and to make room for more additions.  (Muahahahaha!  You knew I had an ulterior motive.)

Et voila – tidy bookshelves away from little hands will make for a very happy Reading Mom.  So, how do I like it?  Actually, I like it a lot.  The brown bookshelves look just fine with the rest of the furniture in the guest room – they complement the green nightstands without being too matchy-matchy, and they also pick up on the brown accents in the bedding.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say the bookshelves look like they were always meant to be in this room.  And – as a bonus – removing the TV stand and putting in furniture that sits closer to the wall opened up the space quite a lot.  As R said when she saw the arrangement for the first time, “It’s amazing that adding more furniture can make a room look bigger.”  Yep, it’s counterintuitive, but it’s true.  Taking the TV out and putting the bookshelves in has made the room look brighter and airier, which wasn’t an expected result but sure is welcome.

So there you have it – a bookish solution and the end to my whining about storing my library.  And now we have an empty room (because I also cleared out the hand-me-downs and moved them to a temporary home in the second guest bedroom) ready for the next step – paint!  But you’ll have to stay tuned for that post… next week.