Showing posts with label bookcases. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bookcases. Show all posts

Monday

What's on our Bookshelves? - Coffee & Conversation.

Do you enjoy reading?

        Do you have a lot of books?








I have 5 bookcases in my study:

  • 1 completely full of Christian novels; 
  • another has Christian novels, devotionals and Bible Study books;
  • the third has bibles, commentaries, biographies and my Agatha Christie collection (Heron Books); 
  • the fourth has language books, photo albums, map books and my hoard of books to use for the Sunday School Curriculum for Church;
  • the last one has the rest of my non-Christian novels by various authors but quite a few of Nelson DeMille, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham, Brad Melizer, Linwood Barclay & Lee Child.






We have lived in 8 different houses since we got married and each time we move we have all these books to pack up and then find the right places in the next home for the bookshelves.  

We keep saying that one day we should be thinking of downsizing so where will we put the books then?  

If they were all available as ebooks would we throw them out and buy them as ebooks? 

I know I would be tempted to keep my nice matching Agatha Christie novels at least as I really am enjoying sitting in the sun room with my hardback copies of these as I read through them all in Chronological Order and then review them here on the blog.

My husband and I read a lot of the same books, just as we watch a lot of the same TV series and this was always very handy when it came to travelling as we took the books we both wanted to read and shared them instead of each packing our own.  

Now of course it is so much handier to just carry our iPads and Kindles and we don't have to spend time beforehand deciding on the joint book list.








The only problem now is that not all the Christian novels we would like to collect are in ebook form.

We also find that those which are available as ebooks are very expensive compared to other novels.

However I do like to keep an eye out through Twitter and Facebook for any indication of free offers on ebooks or reduced prices and swiftly go on Amazon to snap them up.
One way is to try HERE

The great thing about ebooks (apart from the fact that they are easy to carry around in the kindle or iPad) is the fact that you don't need extra bookshelves to store them in, well not real ones anyway.


"Is a book in your hand better than an ebook?"


My oldest son says a book in your hand is so much better than an ebook.
He is worse than us as he has a full wall of his apartment lined with books from floor to ceiling, plus another bookshelf on the wall beside this, then some boxes of books under his bed and of course we must not forget the several boxes of books he still has in our house under the snooker table.









This is like the Daddy.......Chips? question I mentioned in a previous post.

Books........Ebooks?     Which is it to be?




If you are interested in some recommendations for your book shelves - here are some of my favourites:

The Blue Bottle Club by Penelope Stokes

The Presence by Davis Bunn

The Panther by Nelson DeMille

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie









Friday

How to Organise your DVD's


Or maybe I should say

How many Dvds can one Room have?


Now I know that some people buy Dvds watch them and then sell them on ebay.
I buy them on Amazon or ebay and we watch them but we do not generally get rid of them.
Most of them are kept, especially the boxsets and they are stored in The Office




So this was the first thing I tackled in Fred's Office.   

Firstly because he would not ever consent to sorting them.
Secondly because he would not have done it properly - ie. in an organised fashion, noting what collections were complete and which series or episodes we had watched.


We had a little notebook which the kids & I had started some years back trying to keep track of the Dvds we were watching, who was watching and where we have got to in each series etc.

You see our problem was that in a family of five who were not always together it was hard to keep track of what we could watch depending on who was there.  Then it was the combinations of the five of us and what some of us could watch after Fred had gone on to bed (the kids and I are night-birds but Fred is not).  After that it was which series and which episode so we could end up wasting a lot of time looking through to see which episodes had been watched or not.

Nice little notebook and we kept it up to date for quite some time but then the same as everything else we got lazy about it.




I had a look through the apps for my iPad and found a free collections app to try out.
BUT!!! It would only take one collection and if you wanted more collections then the paid version was required.
SO!!!
I took Dvds as my one collection and I started to put in my box sets but after filling in several of them and then trying to put in further details I found that the app just did not give me the flexibility I needed just for the more general info and definitely would not be able to go into the finer detail I would need for noting which series of each set had been watched, which series I still needed to get, which sets had not been started yet etc.


So I came to the decision that a 
Spreadsheet
 was the only way to go.


At first I was disappointed as I thought I would have preferred to have that info in an app and so be able to access it easily via the iPad anytime I was out shopping but on second thought I realised that this would not be a great advantage as I rarely buy Dvds in the shops but mostly online so the spreadsheet would be fine for checking for that.

Hence a lot of time this week was spent getting this set up and filled in and some sort of logical system and Colour Coding thought out to suit me.

Of course this is only one section of the spreadsheet as it is quite long, it is in Alphabetical order and this only shows from A - F so is about one one quarter of my list of box sets.




















As you can see from the Key I am noting which
  • series are still to be bought
  • series are bought but still to be watched
  • series are watched
  • titles are started/ongoing
  • titles are all bought and all watched
  • titles are all bought but not started yet
  • titles are not all bought and not started yet

I have also included the years of production and the initials of the members of the family who have watched them.

The only thing I think has not yet been included is exactly which episode was the last one watched in each of the incomplete Series.  That will simply be done by typing in the number of the last watched episode in the coloured cell of the correct series, and then can easily be changed each time.  Some of that info will come from the little notebook before I scrap the used pages and keep the rest of the notebook for something else and for some of them I will have to guess roughly and look at some episodes to see what I remember and don't remember.


UPDATE:
I think I have mentioned that I have the app "Things which has now been changed to "Things3" and it is even better for projects now as well as for lists so I am now thinking of putting this info into it as well.
However it did cost me money - it was the first app I ever got because my husband Fred insisted I did so as soon as he bought me my first iPad - and it is even more expensive now and so as I am always thinking of cost as well as best suiting my needs I would still recommend a spreadsheet for this.




Do you remember from my Not the Office!! Post just how bad the 2 bookcases with the Dvds were because they had so much else piled on top and in front of the Dvds and the Dvds were all mixed up?

Well if not here is a reminder




Now those two bookcases look like this






I am so pleased with them but Fred is not so pleased because some of the things I moved away have to be sorted out by him!!!

Now of course the inventory of these two bookcases has been made so much easier as well so a good few days work overall and I am very happy with the way things are going around here.





Do you have as many Dvds to keep in order?

Have you made a list of your collection in an app or spreadsheet?