The Dewey Decimal System Comes to Whitelees Cottage

I finished painting what will now be called the guest bedroom.

This afternoon while I was waiting for some bit of paint to dry, I thought I'd start moving the books. The first bookcase. It's looking sparse, but dust free. It will be joined by other bookcases and naturally, the books quite soon.

I was going to have to empty the bookshelves to move them and had the bright idea of finally organising the family book collection into proper order. I will probably never have this opportunity again. Once organised, finding a book later on will be SO much easier. When stacking the books in the last empty room in the house, I sorted them into distinct categories among the piles I made were the categories of Fiction, Travel & Foreign Language, Music and Field Guides. You get the picture.

Most of these books haven't been moved in a decade and were filthy! I was covered in dust. I still have about ten or so boxes of books up in the attic to be brought down and sorted. I'll get to that today after church. Then I can make a pot of tea and start sorting the fiction by author and the non-fiction into its different subjects.

This is the non-fiction pile - Future categories will be humour, politics (no they're NOT the same) biography and reference books (dictionaries and the like).

Fiction - Not yet sorted by author.

Travel and foreign language. This includes travel writing and maps.

Another pile of books that I didn't photograph is for music, which will probably take over an entire bookcase. Last but not least at all are the Rupert and The Broons and Oor Wullie annuals. They are tall books and as they have been collected off and on for over 50 years, take up a lot of space.

These guys were very helpful all day. Here Polly and Julio are ensuring that the fire in the stove stays at the optimum level.