In our family room (which is where we spend the bulk of our day) we have two tall bookcases that have been driving me crazy. The first one was our DVD bookcase, which I finally organized last month. This month I finished the second bookcase, which has the kids summer school books, craft & school supplies, educational toys, cook books, mags, the phone/charger station, and the files/paperwork I use all the time. That’s a lot of stuff for one shelf.

Everything was just getting shoved everywhere. Plus it was hard that the second shelf had too much height and wasted space.

After some rearranging and organizing I was able to improve the book case to this.

First, for the bottom shelf, I got some new $5 magazine files from Target (like the ones I used when I organized my desk area bookcase.) I could have used one or two more but that’s all I could find locally. I used clear plastic holders that I already had for the rest of my magazines. They all fit, along with my manuals binder.
I used various sizes of Martha Stewart’s labels to label everything.

The second to the last shelf holds my recipe binders, cookbooks and a covered bin that holds stamps, address labels, envelops and such.
The middle shelf holds my tall file, my household binders (I’ll share those with you on my next organizing post), the phone and charging station etc.

For the top half of the shelf, I put away the workbooks we no longer needed and cleaned out the paper trays.
For the row that was too tall I bought too shelf rack similar to this. That allowed me to stack up the crayon/marker bins, the games and the craft bins neatly.

All in all, it is working out much better for us! Next time I’ll share about the binders and what went in them. In the meantime, happy organizing!