If you’re interested

I’ve blogged about our bookshelves on the bookblog. It sort of fits in with the series on “how the apartment is coming along”, but since it’s mostly book-related I put it over there.

I realise when looking at the pictures that even if we were able to live like minimalists in all other ways (not likely) our flat would never look minimalist with all those books. And there’s no way we’re covering them up. Or, even worse, making them look minimalist by turning them around. Yes, people actually do this (via). The mind boggles.

Seeking solutions

Slowly, ever so slowly, we are starting to get – well, I was going to say we’re starting to get the flat in order, but perhaps that is a bit premature… At least we’re starting to get an idea of how we want things to be. One of the things we sort of discussed yesterday is whether or not to put up bookshelves along this wall (once the paneling is off and the painting done):

20100901_leil1

I was the hesitant one, would you belive it, but only because I have this wild idea that it would be possible to seat a bucketload of people around a long table if we could utilise the space along there. The husband chimed in with a very reasonable “So you want to base the whole layout of the flat on the one occasion where we might want to seat 30 people?” And I had to conceed that he is quite right, it would be madness not to use this space for bookshelves.

However, since the majority of our books are less than 20 cm wide, I suggested that, as a sort of compomise, it would be best if we could get shelves that are only 20 cm deep – as opposed to the 30 cm that seem to be standard. This, however, is easier said than done. IKEA has one model with 24 cm deep shelves, but that doesn’t come with enough shelves so you end up with wasted space in the other direction. We could go down the custom built route, but how easy (or difficult) is that going to be?

Well, the godawful paneling has to go first, so we have some time to think about it…