It's still January...

What is it about the first month of each year? While time usually races by, more rapidly each year as I get older, January seems to last forever. The humorous poet Brian Bilston captured it perfectly. Well, perhaps it's not quite 6184 days, but I'm sure it's a lot more than five weeks since Christmas. I took the decorations down on Saturday 4th January so I could clean properly - they had been up for nearly a month - but I didn't do a whole lot else. 

I had such good plans for my time. Not 'resolutions' - I don't really see the point of them. Just a realistic way of trying to ensure I made the best use of my days, without over-scheduling or stress. I more-or-less followed that in the first full week of January.  On the Monday, I did some work on my recipe blog. I added a new recipe, edited some older ones, and added in some photos. I played around with the theme, too. It's not ideal, but I think probably better than the previous one. 

On the Wednesday I walked to my favourite haberdashery shop, and bought some new yarn for knitting baby hats, and then went to the thrift store, where I found a couple of DVDs that looked good. On the Thursday, I spent a couple of hours working on photos. I did some writing in the afternoons, too, though not as much as I had hoped. 

On the Friday, we didn't need to do any extra grocery shopping, but had decided that we would upgrade the rather rickety bookshelving in our guest flat living room, replacing with an Ikea Billy bookcase with glass doors. We were also thinking about a dedicated TV unit. So we drove (in the van) to Nicosia, and found not just the bookcase we needed, but a kitchen unit thing in pine which, we knew, would make a good TV unit. 

On Friday afternoon, Richard put the bookcase together...

After I had removed all the books from the old shelving: 

The TV was still on its old shelving along with a lot of other books which had become quite dusty over the years. And we agreed that we would need a second bookcase to match the first one, since we had too many books to fit in just the one. 

We didn't want to go back to Ikea, and we knew what we wanted, so we ordered online. We quickly realised that it was better to make two orders, each one less than 35kg, rather than all in one, from the postage point of view. The site said delivery would be 3 working days to Larnaka... 

.. although when the order was sent, it said that delivery would be 'within 6 working days'. Our first guest flat visitor of the year was due to arrive on Monday 20th, and we had hoped to get everything ready and tidied before then. Still, we hoped it might arrive on Friday or Saturday...

On the Monday morning, January 13th, was the first writers' group meeting of the year. And on the Wednesday I had planned to do a thorough clean of the guest flat, hoping to get it ready.  Our last guests were friends who left towards the end of October. Since then, the flat has been used by Richard to work on his PA system, and, in early January, for items from his boat, which was out of the water for a couple of weeks, for its biannual 'dry dock'. And it still had tools for building Ikea furniture, and wood varnish for the unit which Richard put together: 

I was becoming a bit concerned about getting everything ready for our visitor (who is staying for about eight weeks). So it was something of a relief to hear, on Wednesday, that there had been a delay, and he wasn't arriving until Wednesday 29th. 

Still, I did clean the main bedroom on Wednesday 13th, and made up the bed.  On Thursday morning I did more in the flat: washing cushion covers, and the sofa throw, and cleaning the bathroom. I also sorted the books better, calculating how many would fill up the two billy bookcases. I wanted to remove the books which had been taking up space in the bedroom, too, and the ones occupying space, rather precariously, on a spice rack in the kitchen. 

And... shock, horror! - I decided that we should probably get rid of about fifty or sixty books which we were never going to read, and which, we're pretty sure, none of our guests has ever looked at. We gave our local friends first refusal (and they took a fair selection) and I chose about fifteen of the remainder that were in the best condition for the church book sale. The rest, to our relief, were eventually taken by the Larnaka thrift store. 

But that's leaping forwards. On Friday 17th we went to Superhome store, then on to the nut shop (for five or six weeks' worth of nuts, seeds and dried fruit) and then Metro (for dried cat food and one or two other items). Richard had a phone call from Ikea while we were out, letting us know that the new bookcase would be delivered on Sunday. When he was hoping to be out sailing, and I had planned to go to the church service. But they didn't give any other options.

As it turned out, we were both at home. On Friday evening, Richard didn't want any food, and said he felt queasy. He slept most of the evening. In the morning I got up to walk with Sheila but after a short distance I knew I wasn't feeling well, so we turned around and I came in. 

I won't mention the details; suffice it to say that we both had a very miserable 24 hours with what we assume was an attack of norovirus. Richard felt a little better by Saturday afternoon, and got up. Sheila had brought us a loaf of bread, as I'd mentioned in passing that we'd run out and I was going to make some but wasn't sure I would cope with the smell of baking bread. We were very, very thankful for her thoughtfulness as the only thing either of us wanted to eat at first was toast with Marmite. I don't usually eat Marmite as it can be a migraine trigger; thankfully it wasn't on Monday, which is the first time I wanted to eat anything at all. 

The new bookcase arrived on Sunday and Richard was able to let the men in. He had cancelled sailing, and there was no way I could get to church; even if I'd been feeling up to it, I wouldn't have wanted to pass on such a nasty bug to anyone else. By Monday 20th, he felt a bit stronger, and put the bookcase together. And since I didn't want to remain in bed (and my worst symptoms had stopped, although I was still very tired) I did organise and sort the books. 

We were very pleased with how it all looked when we had finished. 

We were also extremely grateful that our visitor was not arriving that day!

On Wednesday some friends from Limassol were coming to dinner. We were past the infectious stage by then, though being extra careful with hand-washing still. I had started eating again, but was still incredibly tired, so it took me most of the day to organise the food for the evening. I had to keep sitting down every ten minutes or so. 

Then on Thursday I basically collapsed in a heap (after walking about half our usual route first thing with Sheila) and vegged out. On Friday we took the remaining books to the thrift store, and on Saturday I finally managed to clean the kitchen, and even sort and tidy the area over the washing machine which somehow accumulates a lot of random stuff. It still looks a bit cluttered: 

But I filled an entire bag with almost-empty long-expired bottles of suntan lotion, and hair spray, and body wash, and so on, to get rid of.  It's probably three years since we last did a proper spring clean of the flat, so it was good to do. 

And on Monday morning, this week, I took our carpet shampooer downstairs and thoroughly cleaned the rug in the living room, which had been looking very tired. 

That's the difference after I had cleaned the two stripes nearest the bookcases.  

Our visitor is now here, and the flat is going to be occupied almost continually for the next five months, with a variety of different people. We're very thankful to have it, and love being able to make it available to family, friends, church workers and friends of friends. 

It feels like we've done a lot this month, and there's still another day of January remaining. Today, Thursday, I worked on photos for an hour or so, for the second time this month, and this afternoon am updating this blog. Maybe in February, when it eventually gets here, I'll be back to the supposedly regular schedule...

Buying Billies

 Before I ramble about on our recent experience, I should explain that when I talk about 'Billies' I'm not referring to:

• The lightweight pots (billycans) used for outdoor cooking, popularised in one of the versions of an Australian song, featuring a swagman who 'waited 'til his billy boiled'. 
• A male goat, as, for example in the fairytale 'The three billygoats gruff'.
• A stick or club - known as a truncheon in the UK - which, I learned when checking for meanings of the word, may also be known as a 'billy' or 'billystick'. 
• A group of adults called Billy (or Billie), which is usually an abbreviation of the name 'William' or (possibly) 'Wilhelmina' 

Instead, I'm referring to a brand of bookcases that can be bought in the Swedish furniture chain Ikea. It's one of the few brands that we are able to pronounce. 

Our first introduction to Billy bookcases happened in the summer of 2006 just before we moved out of our rental house in Cyprus, into the one we bought. Some colleagues were leaving Cyprus around the same time, and offered to sell us some dark wood bookcases. 

At the time it was rather difficult to find bookcases locally. Sixteen years ago, there was no Ikea in Cyprus. The thrift store had some bookcases, but they were a bit flimsy. We had been able to buy two large ones second-hand from the organisation Richard was seconded to, some years earlier, and we had some rattan bookcases we had brought out from the UK. 

But they were starting to overflow. And we had shipped another five hundred or so books out when we sold our UK house. So the offer from our friends was timely, and since they were asking a very reasonable price, we had little hesitation in buying the two bookcases. They told us they were 'Billies' and we probably looked blank. They had been brought to Cyprus by another family who had moved from France but returned a few years earlier. Billies, we were told, were quite popular in countries where there was an Ikea. But we were not familiar with them. 

It's possible that we had the first two Billy bookcases in Cyprus. We rapidly filled them. 

(As an aside: the same folk were also selling four ceiling fans. They were exactly what we needed for four places in our new house. We didn't know that they were available until we went to see the bookcases, and our friends didn't know that we were looking for something to replace the fancy chandeliers that the previous owners of the house had taken away. It felt like a divine appointment; those four ceiling fans still work well, and are a tremendous blessing in the warmer months). 

We had visited an Ikea in the UK a couple of times, and hadn't found much that appealed. But we very much liked these bookcases, with their adjustable shelving, and the little metal knobs that fit into holes in the sides. They hold a lot of books, too. 

A year later, in September 2007, Ikea launched in Cyprus, just outside Nicosia. We visited a few months later, and acquired two more Billies: a tall black one for our DVD collection, and a smaller black one, which ended up taking our recipe books... for a while.  I wrote about the experience in this post. That's when we discovered that the 'new' system Billies were not only a darker colour, but ten centimetres narrower. However, that was ideal for our DVDs, and had plenty of room for more. 

Another year later, in September 2008, we visited Ikea again. This time we bought three shorter Billy bookcases for our dining room. The rattan cases were not only running out of space, they were being progressively destroyed by our cats, who thought they were convenient scratching posts. I wrote about that experience in this post. 

Nearly three years later, we were contemplating adding to our Billy collection due to books, once again, overflowing their shelves. Perhaps they were breeding when we weren't looking. And then we had another divine appointment: friends were getting rid of three bookcases, one of which was a Billy. It wasn't a dark wood one, but that didn't worry us. We did some major re-sorting of books and DVDs, as explained in detail in this post so that the light wood Billy took our DVDs, and the resulting arrangement looked like this:

There was still plenty of space for more books and DVDs, and we also acquired two non-Billy bookcases that we used elsewhere. 

Time passed, as it usually does. 

At some point we bought another tall black Billy, so we could move the light coloured one upstairs to a bedroom, and use one of the original - wider - Billies to house our growing DVD collection. 

We had a slightly annoying gap for a while, due to lack of planning on my behalf, which remained for some years. 

Although the books were mostly under control - the rate of acquiring new ones slowed, and I even managed to give a few away to the local church book sale - our DVD collection didn't stop. It's not that we watch all that many, but we aim to see one film per week, and an episode or two from a classic sitcom or a more modern tenser or heavier television show (most recently Father Brown; we're about to embark on the 13th Doctor Who series). And Richard has a growing collection of DVDs which are thrillers or political dramas that don't interest me at all, but which he sometimes sees on his own if I'm away, or if he is up late. 

So, in 2019, we looked at the Ikea catalogue again. To our joy, they were selling a narrow (20cm wide) Billy, the same height as our bookcases, but with a lot more shelves, intended for CDs or DVDs. We did ponder buying two, but were pretty sure that just one would last us a good long time. 

And in the process of re-organising the DVDs, we decided to move the second older Billy to the kitchen to house the recipe books (and also some of my children's fiction) meaning that the three matching black ones could sit in a row, without any annoying gap.  

We were pleased with the result.

In the corner was a gap of just over 20cm, where we were pretty sure that, one day, we would need a second narrow Billy. But not just yet...

And, indeed, four years later the DVDs were still fitting in the available space. Well, mostly. I had moved all the younger children's DVDs to the bottom shelf of the nearest bookcase. We also had a drawer under the television crammed full with our Christmas DVDs and the ones we haven't yet watched, and the series we are currently watching...

Then, a few weeks ago, we received a couple of Christmas parcels from one of our sons and his family, containing, among other things, a new and rather large DVD series. So that sat on a shelf under our television for a while, and we began to think seriously about a new narrow Billy. 

The decision was cemented when a friend, moving from one flat to another, decided to get rid of her DVD collection since she mostly watches online now. She gave us the first refusal, and since she had a lot of older classics which we hadn't seen, we selected a few. And a few more... and ended up adding another 25 DVDs to our household.

But where could we put them...?  The drawer was choc-a-bloc, the shelf also crammed with DVDs. It was starting to look rather untidy and we're pretty sure we'll acquire more DVDs in future.

So I went online and searched the Ikea site. I read that Billy bookcases had been discontinued for a while, but were back, better than ever. 

But there were no 20cm ones. The narrowest was 40cm, and that was clearly meant to be a bookcase rather than a DVD case, as it didn't have extra shelves. DVD shelving seems to have gone out of fashion, possibly because more and more people are using streaming services rather than physical DVDs. 

Then, due to an inner prompting - you can call it intuition, or the voice of God - I looked on Facebook marketplace. It's not somewhere I normally look, but I thought someone might have some kind of DVD storage that they were getting rid of.

I found someone just outside Nicosia who was selling TWO 20cm black Billy CD/DVD cases. They weren't advertised as Billy, but I was certain they were. Richard made contact, and a couple of days later we took his van and drove to collect them. I wasn't at all sure that we needed two, but since they might be the last two available narrow Billies in Cyprus, we bought them both. One of them is fitted where we planned, the other behind the TV where it's housing Richard's thrillers and other series that I have no wish to see. 

We moved the rest of the TV series DVD sets and the Christmas ones to the side cases, and there's now, once again, plenty of room for more.  

That corner looks much better without the gap:

As well as the two narrow Billies, the folk in Nicosia were also selling 18 children's DVDs, very inexpensively, some of them modern classics that we didn't have... 

...so we acquired another fourteen. So I'm now a tad concerned that we have almost filled up the shelf of children's DVDs. 

But that's a problem for another day.

Re-reading and Re-homing of Books

As I wrote in a post nearly two weeks ago, I have a somewhat overcrowded shelf of books which I haven't yet read. I just stopped typing to count, and there are thirty-eight of them. That includes five for the reading group I mentioned in that post, and three or four from my birthday earlier this year, or possibly even last Christmas. 

The rest are almost all from the St Helena's monthly book sales, some of them bought as long ago as November 2018. At fifty cents a book, it's very tempting to pick up all kinds of books I might not otherwise think about. If I decide I don't like them, I can donate them back the following month... or year, or whenever I get around to reading them.

What I didn't mention is that we also have about 3,500 books, most of which I have read at least once, in various locations around the house. And since I have some favourite authors whose works I like to re-read regularly, I try to intersperse around three or four new-to-me books with six or seven old favourites. 

I'm told I started reading books when I was about three or four. My first favourite books were by Enid Blyton (as was the case with most of my generation in the UK). For all her many faults in style and attitudes, she engendered a love of reading in many thousands of young children. By the time I was about ten or eleven, I had a couple of hundred books of my own, and during my teenage years I used to spend most of my birthday or Christmas money on inexpensive Armada paperbacks, which were popular in the 1970s, often on special offer during the January sales.

There wasn't much 'teenage fiction' in those days; I still re-read my older children's fiction (Malcolm Saville, Elinor M Brent-Dyer, Noel Streatfeild, Louisa M Alcott etc) and I also began reading 'grown-up' fiction when I was around twelve or thirteen. At school I discovered Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. My father introduced me to PG Wodehouse, my mother introduced me to Gerald Durrell, and my aunt, who worked in a bookshop, introduced me to Georgette Heyer. These are still amongst my favourite writers. 

It wasn't until I was in my mid twenties that I came across authors like Rosamunde Pilcher and Maeve Binchy, and the whole world of so-called 'contemporary women's fiction'. I gradually collected some, many bought second-hand or given to me for a birthday or Christmas if I requested them. When I like an author, I try to collect all their works. 

By the time we had moved all our books to Cyprus, I had around two hundred volumes of 'my' fiction, mostly character-based saga novels, light Regency romances, contemporary fiction, some Christian fiction, and some oddities like Terry Pratchett's 'Discworld' series.  We also had perhaps a hundred biographies, two hundred or so Christian non-fiction books, a hundred or so of Richard's fiction (thrillers, spy fiction, and so on) and around five hundred children's books, mostly from my childhood and teens, and the ones given to our sons. And some general non-fiction, of course: dictionaries, reference books and so on. 

However, I'm not entirely sure how the 1200 or so books we had on our shelves around twenty years ago have managed to multiply to nearly three times as many. But we are finally running out of bookcase space, and - more worrying - of places to put new bookcases. I hate getting rid of books, though I don't mind passing them on to other people who I know will love them. So, until recently, when I need to make space in 'my' bookcases, which are in our dining room, I have moved a few more down to our guest flat. 

I've been keeping track of all my reading on GoodReads, LibraryThing and my book reviews blog for a little over twenty years, and in that time I've apparently read 2171 books.  That's not very many.  Since the boys left home the amount has increased, and I'm aiming to read 120 books this year, though I'm a bit behind schedule at present.  

But I worked out that if I read 120 books per year, and simply re-read all our book collection, without anything new, it would take me 30 years to finish. Now I'm not going to read Richard's books (around 1000, including both sailing and thriller-type fiction and some of his theological and missiological books) and I'm not going to sit down and read reference books, of which we have many. 

Even if I just include 'my' fiction books there are probably well over 1000 of them, and there are some I want to re-read at least once a decade.  I read some non-fiction too, and there are some of my children's/teenage books that I like to re-read regularly. In my planned ten books per month, I usually aim for one Christian non-fiction, two or three new-to-me-books, one or two re-read children's books, and five favourite authors from 'my' fiction whom I'm re-reading. Sixty per year. 600 in a decade...

Thus I don't need to keep more than about 600 of 'my' fiction. And that's about the number I have on our dining room shelves.

So for every new book I read, and want to keep (and probably re-read eventually) I can move a book to the guest flat. Of course it doesn't quite work that way; usually I fit more and more in the gaps until I have no room at all, then select a dozen or so to take downstairs. That's what happened on Saturday, although I was more ruthless, and removed thirty books from the shelves. 

They were so squashed together that I spread them out a little.. I blew off some dust, too, and cleaned the shelves properly.  They do look cleaner, but while there are now one or two slight gaps, it doesn't look as though thirty books have been removed.

Then I looked at the guest flat shelves.  The bookcases are becoming over-full. And since guests usually only stay a week or two, they don't need many hundreds of books, so it finally occurred to me that I could actually pass a few of the guest flat books to the church book sale. A radical thought. There are books down there which I know I will never read again. There are some which I have never read at all. There are some I don't recall ever having seen before... 

I found about thirty books which I plan to give to the book sale. Here's a selection, two of which are duplicates of books we have elsewhere, some of which I read and didn't like, some of which I read and thought were okay, but I won't read them again, and at least one of which I am quite certain I have never seen before. Indeed, when I went to remove these books (and the others I found) from my GoodReads and LibraryThing catalogues, three of the ones I didn't recognise weren't there at all. Maybe books breed when I'm not looking. 

Or maybe a guest bought a book at the airport, read it, decided they wouldn't read it again, and left it behind. If that's the case, I just hope they won't look for the book when - in some futuristic post-pandemic world - they visit us again.

Assimilating Bookcases

Our son Tim has been living in Cyprus for the past three years; initially with us, and then, for the past couple of years, in a flat he was renting close to his workplace. However he's now accepted a job back in the UK, and will be moving there in about ten days. So he and his cat have moved into our guest flat, temporarily, and the last fortnight has been spent clearing out and cleaning his flat. His landlord bought some of his furniture, some has gone into storage, and some has come to us.

I was particularly keen to have his three bookcases: two large black Billy ones which he bought from Ikea, and a light brown one which I think we probably bought at the thrift store some years ago.

I can never resist bookcases, but we did already have quite a few and are running out of wall space. We had some ideas about where to put three more, but it took most of last weekend to get them sorted. I posted on Facebook that I was 'assimilating bookcases', and someone queried the term; it sounds, after all, rather 'Borg' to assimilate something. Yet the word simply means adopting, taking as one's own, absorbing into oneself - or, in this case, into our home. Indeed, I realise it's the term I used five years ago in one of our previous acquisitions of bookcases.

The light brown one was the simplest. At least, I thought it would be. There's a space in my study where I used to have one of my bookcases, and I had decided I wanted to keep the photo albums there, rather than on a high shelf in our dining room. I am still slowly scanning through old negatives, and kept having to dash to and fro to check dates in albums.

However the one from Tim's flat was a little narrower than I had thought, so I decided to make that into my recipe bookcase at the end of the kitchen:

That meant that the one which used to hold the recipe books, which was a bit wider, could come into my study.  I already had a matching bookcase which held the fiction books I'm planning to read soon, my writing books and some other reference and useful non-fiction that I refer to often, so I moved those into this bookcase:

And the photo albums then went into the matching one by my desk, making them convenient to check quickly when scanning:

So that was the first bookcase sorted and assimilated.

We knew that we wanted one of the black Billy bookcases in our living room. But that was even less straightforward. We had a pale brown Billy bookcase that held all our DVDs, but it was - metaphorically speaking - bulging at the seams. There was no room for any new ones at all.  We had a couple of old-style dark brown Billy units that we bought from friends ten years ago, which are 90cm wide rather than 80cm, so I decided to use one of those for the DVDs instead, to give some extra space.

So the DVDs came out of the old light brown unit, and the books came out of the dark brown Billy, and that went next to the window in the living room to house our DVDs, with space for more:

We have around 300 DVDs, which compares nicely with our 3,000 or so books.

The new black Billy went in the gap where the wider one was previously. I had to move some of the books it had held into the one in the corner, but I managed to move other things around to allow for that.

Unsurprisingly, this new arrangement leaves a 10cm gap, and eventually we'll probably take the books out of the one on the right and move it up, but it's not urgent.

The light brown unit which previously held the DVDs was then moved up to the room which used to be Tim's, and where he will sleep on future visits from the UK. It's housing some of his theology books at present, since he's flying with just a couple of suitcases, staying in temporary accommodation until he has longer-term plans.

As for the other tall black Billy bookcase, I realised that could go in our dining room; or, rather, the place between the dining area and kitchen, where we had a shorter Billy that held my teenage fiction. We had the place mats and a few other bits and pieces on top of it, so it was easy enough to replace the books in the tall bookcase, and put the other things on shelves:

That left us with a short black Billy which sat in the living room for a while.  Eventually I realised that that could go on a convenient gap in our staircase, where we had another shelving unit that held tall art books, old computer manuals, and some folders of music that isn't currently used (piano, guitar and clarinet, primarily) but which might be needed at some point.

It fits nicely and looks much better:

But then we were left with the slatted shelving unit which previously held all these books....

No problem; I wanted something taller in the unused shower cubicle in my study, where we keep beach equipment, cool bags, my shopping trolley and a few other random things that don't go anywhere else.

So I cleared out the old unit, which was much shorter, and replaced it with the tall one, making everything easier to access:

That left me with a smaller pine shelving unit... and it didn't take long to realise that it would go quite nicely in our main floor loo, where there was an ancient white (and rather tatty) unit.  It felt a little awkward at first, but looks a great deal better:

... which left a small white unit, and I realised today that it's gone. I have no idea where.

I think 'assimilation' is definitely the correct term!

Being surprisingly organised and domesticated in Cyprus

I'm not naturally an organised person at all. As with most traits, to misquote Shakespeare rather drastically: some people are born organised, some achieve organisation, and some have organisation thrust upon them. I think I fall somewhere between the second and third categories. Nobody has ever forced me to be organised - just as well, or I might have refused completely. However, over the years, prompted by various circumstances, I've worked out ways to keep the house reasonably clean and tidy, to store financial records in case the tax office ever needs them, to ensure we all have clean and folded clothes, and so on.

On the topic of clothes, I used to do a bit of ironing... shirts, pillowcases, the occasional skirt - but gave up completely about five or six years ago. I don't think anybody has noticed (not that it would matter much if they did), and I find that if I fold or hang garments straight from the washing line, they don't develop creases anyway. Living in Cyprus, we don't have a tumble dryer; I have washing lines in a utility area at the back of the kitchen, where everything dries naturally within a few hours. Unless of course it's pouring with rain, in which case it gets an extra drenching, and dries the following day.

A few years ago, someone showed me a method of folding tee-shirts which made it quicker and neater for me. I don't usually link to other people's videos, but since this is impossible to describe in words, this youtube video demonstrates and explains as well as any that I've found. Apparently it's a Japanese method. It took me a few days to get used to it, but now I do this without thinking.

However, I continued stacking tee-shirts on top of each other in our drawers or closets, which is fine for a while, until someone happens to be in a hurry, but doesn't want the one on top. Or, worse, when someone burrows through them looking for a specific shirt. Then the piles get more and more crumpled and untidy, and when I try to put more clean shirts in the drawer, there's no room... and eventually I have to pull them all out and re-fold them.  Which is annoying.

At least, it WAS annoying until a few months ago when a Facebook friend linked to a site which showed neatly folded tee-shirts stacked in a row, rather than in a pile. I'm not going to give a link to that site since the language was not family-friendly.  Instead, here's a photo of Richard's tee-shirt drawer a couple of weeks after I first started doing this:

I do the Japanese-style fold, then fold them in half vertically, and put them in at the right of the drawer. Richard can then choose whatever shirt he needs at a glance, without having to move any of the others. So they stay tidy, and don't get crumpled - indeed, folding and putting them in the drawer like this means that they look almost as if they have been ironed.

I then started doing this on my own tee-shirt shelf, and am sure it has saved a lot of time, as well as being better for the shirts. 

Books - far more interesting than clothes - also have to be organised if we're to have any hope of finding them. We have around 3,000 in all, and as we acquire more (and more bookcases) I have to find ways to sort and arrange them. This is easy enough for the fiction; my main fiction (five bookcases in our dining room) is arranged alphabetically by the author's surname. Books we don't particularly like, or have duplicates of, or don't think we'll ever read again are downstairs in our guest flat.

Children's fiction is a little more complicated; the bulk of it is in our guest flat second bedroom, also arranged alphabetically. But my favourite children's/teenage fiction - the ones I re-read, or which friends borrow regularly - are in the main part of the house, and those I have kept for younger children are in my study, where I regularly entertain small people who love books too.

Then there's the non-fiction. We don't have so many of these, and about half of them are Christian books which I also have alphabetically by author, with a mini-shelf of Bibles in the middle, and a shelf at the bottom for study guides and larger reference books:

(If you are one of those people who likes to read the titles of other people's books when you see them in blogs, you will probably need to click on the photo to see a larger version. Then use the X or back button to return to this post, if you haven't completely lost interest by then). 

Then there are the other books. Biographies, science books, popular psychology, books about history, and about games, and so on... the ones that we acquire when we're interested in a specific topic, or when the blurb looks fascinating in a second-hand shop, or which we've rescued when someone else is having a book cull (shudder!) 

Richard has all his sailing books in the bedroom - at least two shelves of them - and I have a shelf in my study with books about writing. But I've never managed to work out what to do with the rest of the general non-fiction. I tried roughly organising by subject, but get stuck - is a book about someone climbing mountains classed as sports, geography or biography?  And then I want to put books by the same author together, which is fine if the author's just written on one broad topic, but sometimes one writer can encompass a wide range of subjects. 

So for the past few years our non-fiction has been quite muddled, which doesn't matter, in the scheme of things (I know, this is very much a 'first world problem' post) but sometimes makes it hard to find them. I said something about it a few weeks ago, and Richard said - jokingly - that I should arrange them by Dewey Decimal number.  I rolled my eyes... but somehow the idea was planted in my mind. 

So I browsed a little, and discovered a site where I could enter an ISBN and have the Dewey Decimal number appear. It felt like quite a daunting task, but I'd been thinking for some time that I should enter all our non-fiction books into our 'shelves' on Goodreads and Shelfari, where I rate and briefly review everything I read, and also enter new books we are given or otherwise acquire. And as with any daunting task, it can be broken down into small steps. So I use my little travelling Netbook computer, and spend about fifteen minutes each day generating the classification number for ten books, and entering them (if I haven't previously done so) on Shelfari and Goodreads. 

When the books are nice editions with dustcovers, I just put the number in pencil on an inside page. If they're older books with white spines, I write them on neatly in black ink. And for the rest, I use little sticky labels covered with sellotape.  Yes, it makes them look like library books, but at last I have a method for sorting and (I hope) finding them.  Here are the first three shelves - I'm about half way through, I think:

I know, we have shamefully few general non-fiction books. Excluding the Christian ones, and the sailing and writing ones, there are probably only about three hundred. I suppose this is partly because one can find so much online these days. And partly because we all tend to read fiction, primarily.

All of which sounds as if I'm actually a very well-organised person, but - alas - this is far from the case. If I were,  I would have worked out ways to be more organised a few decades ago. 

Ikea again. Bookcases and chairs...

I know many people look down their noses a bit at Ikea furniture. Certainly some of it is rather flimsy, and much of it is clearly flatpack and inexpensive. Not that this is necessarily a problem, and with rather a lack of reasonably priced furniture shops in Cyprus, we were delighted when an Ikea superstore was opened in Nicosia six years ago.

We don't go there often; it's about a 35 minute drive from our home, so although that's not a huge distance, it's not somewhere we pop to regularly.  But perhaps a couple of times each year: sometimes more often still.

Our most recent trip was on Thursday last week. The reason - as so often - was that we were in need of more bookcases.

Or rather, Tim was in need of bookcases.  When he moved back to Cyprus a few months ago, he brought out most of his library, a somewhat eclectic mixture comprising - among other things - a large number of theology books:

We spent some time brainstorming possible ways of rearranging Tim's room to fit in another bookcase, but it's not a large room - and one of the bookcases he has already is in a rather awkward place, meaning he can't access one of his closets.

So Richard proposed having a bookcase or two in the little bit of corridor outside Tim's room. There's not much space there - certainly not enough for the Billy bookcases that we usually buy - but we had discovered another range, called Besta, which have much shallower shelves. We weren't sure if they would fit, but Richard measured the gap carefully...

... And sure enough, when we found the Besta bookcases at Ikea last week, they were exactly the right width for the gap.  Not really tall enough, but we realised that one of the smaller ones would fit exactly on top of one of the larger ones, and the two together only cost about the same as one tall Billy. Moreover, they came with fittings so that they could be joined together.

So over the next couple of days, Richard spent some time - assisted by Tim - putting these shelves together. They do indeed fit perfectly in the available space:

So far there is only one book that has made its way onto the shelves, but we hope they will be filled soon, thus easing the overflow of books in Tim's room.

However...

It's almost impossible to go to Ikea and just emerge with nothing extra. Prepared for this eventuality we had picked up a store bag on our way in, and had found some sticky replacement roller things for getting cat hairs out of furniture, and a few other random small items. 

But then we came to the office chairs. Tim had been hoping Ikea might still stock the chair he had bought in the UK, which he liked very much indeed, but they didn't.  He really wanted a comfortable desk chair since he sits at his desk so much, and tried out several before discovering one that he said was wonderfully comfortable. It wasn't even horrendously expensive.  

I commented that I had never found real office chairs comfortable. I have tried many, but for many years have found nothing suited me as much as a rather garish orange kitchen chair - here it is, in front of my desk, way back in our old house in 2005 (note the old computer and screen!) 

We paid a couple of pounds for that chair nearly sixteen years ago, so it's done me very well, but it was starting to look extremely tatty.

I sat in an identical chair to the one Tim liked, and was astounded at how comfortable it was. Richard took this not-very-flattering photo:

We sat there quite a while while Tim debated whether or not he wanted it, and eventually decided he would. And I was somehow persuaded to have one too. If I didn't like it, I reasoned, Richard could have it.. he has an adequate desk chair, but it's not particularly strong and won't last forever.

We got everything home and unpacked. And then discovered a significant problem, in that my desk (also very old - the same one from the photo above, which has also lasted me 16 years and probably cost us not much more than the orange chair...) has an opening that's too narrow for this new office chair.

I tried all kinds of ways of sitting on it before opting for a semi-diagonal method, which seems to work. The chair really is very comfortable when I'm sitting back in it; it has a slight rock, and a fabric covering, and Sophia has given it her decided nod of approval:

So I'll probably keep it. I do like it, very much. But Richard and Tim think I should probably now have a new desk...

Out of Cyprus: the building of a bookcase

The reason we flew out of Cyprus when we did and drove to Carlisle was so that Richard and Daniel could spend their joint birthday together. However, we had not actually bought Daniel's present before leaving, hoping we could find something on the Saturday.

Daniel had asked us to bring some of his juggling equipment with us, and also one of his books. But when Richard packed the cases, we were quite a long way under our weight limit. Not wanting to waste weight, so to speak, he decided to bring one or two more of Daniel's books. I chose about four... and then Richard picked out yet more until our suitcases weighed just under the 20kg limit.

I was a little surprised at just how many books we had brought out, when they had all emerged from our cases:


So it seemed like a good plan to buy him a new bookcase for his birthday. The one they have already is a tall Ikea one in a beech style finish. Unfortunately the nearest Ikea is in Liverpool, and we really didn't want to drive that far on a Saturday. Ordering it online would have meant it arriving several days late.

So we looked in Argos, and found a slightly smaller bookcase in a very similar finish, and Daniel said that yes, he would like that.

Then came the problem of where to put it. Several suggestions were proposed, but we eventually thought it would work best next to the living room door. To check the width, and to ensure that the light switch was still reachable, I stood in position with a shelf, on which Daniel put a few books to add to the realism, so that they could check whether it looked right. Richard took this photo on his phone:


Daniel then set to work to assemble the flat-pack bookcase, with me holding the relevant parts in position as needed:


A friend pointed out that this photo looks as if I'm going head-first down a slide. Something I cannot imagine ever wanting to do...

The next part, nailing the back in place, took some time - not helped by the fact that Daniel could not find a hammer, so used a variety of implements before selecting a thick glass jar as the most effective - and it was time to eat before it was finished. So the bookcase leaned against the wall, looking rather sad:


.. and there it stayed, all night.

Sunday morning was the joint birthday, and most of Daniel's other presents were, to his joy, books:

So we turned the bookcase around and finished it, and admired it, and then Daniel put a large number of books in place:



However, we decided that a six-shelf bookcase was perhaps slight overkill for just the Kindle, so Daniel and Becky re-organised their other bookcase a little, in order to decide what might go on the new one:


.. and, as happens when bookcases are assimilated into a household, it wasn't long before the new one was looking completely at home:

Bookcases have been assimilated...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a new bookcase we acquired from some friends. Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that I mentioned that we were thinking about having two more bookcases from the same friends, albeit rather smaller. We decided that we would, indeed, like them. My five fiction bookcases in the dining room were overflowing; I relied on having lots of people borrowing books to have enough space, and that wasn't working since friends going away from the summer had returned books without borrowing more.

So I thought I might use one of the new bookcases for my recipe books, and then use the current recipe book bookcase for an extra fiction one. I wasn't entirely sure where it would go... but last Sunday evening we collected the two bookcases, and as they were quite light, I tried one of them out in a few possible spots the following morning, before realising that the perfect place was by the back door. Transferring all the recipe books didn't take long, and since there were two spare shelves I moved the cool boxes (which were in the way elsewhere) to the bottom one, and the potatoes, onions and garlic (which were on a tatty old vegetable rack) to another one. I really like the result:


Even a week later, it still makes me smile when I look at the new bookcase from the kitchen:


I shelve our fiction books alphabetically by the surname of the author, but decided that, rather than simply moving them all around to fit in the ex-recipe-book shelves, I'd remove the 'teenage' fiction that was amongst the rest, and give its own bookcase. I suppose it's a little arbitrary what counts as 'teenage' fiction, since the teens who borrow books from me take quite a wide range... but I decided to move books that were actually written for teenagers. Including, for instance, my 60+ Chalet School books, the Harry Potter series, books by Noel Streatfeild, Malcolm Saville, LM Alcott and LM Montgomery, the Redwall series... and a few others:


Then, I moved the rest of the books along, filling in the gaps, but not squashing them on the shelves as they were before. I added in the extras that I didn't previously have room for, and left a few small gaps where I knew there were still books out on loan.


What did rather surprise (and slightly worry) me was that although I had gained five extra shelves, by the time I reached the end of the fiction, I only had two and a half shelves with nothing on them:


Tessie always likes sleeping next to books, so she was pleased with the new arrangements:


Meanwhile, another bookcase was sitting, empty, in my study, where Cleo thought it made a comfortable bed:


I knew where I wanted to put it (next to my desk) but there was a slight problem in that that spot was taken by a small white bookcase, on top of which was our broadband router. Wires stretched from the computer in one direction, and from the telephone socket in another. We didn't want to have to make holes in the new bookcase, so Richard said he'd make a new phone wire, enabling us to put the router neatly on the unit that houses the computer, printer and scanner. It took a few days for him to have the time, but towards the end of the week he did.

That meant that I could move the white unit out of the way, and the new bookcase to its new place. At the bottom went some heavy encyclopedias which we've been looking after for friends for about seven or eight years now, and which were previously at the bottom of the recipe bookcase.. and which had been sitting piled up on a table in my study for a few days. They fit nicely, so I then moved my writing books, and various other reference books, and also my shelf of fiction-that-I- have-not-yet-read. I like very much having a bookcase next to my desk:


So, now I was left with a mostly empty bookcase at the other end of my study. I had already planned to move some of my favourite children's fiction books up from our guest flat, since we have regular small visitors and like to have a variety of books to read with them:


I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the white unit which no longer held the router. It contained such useful items as empty CDs and DVDs, and cases, and some old CDs with software, and a load of apparently random cables; so I found a spot by the window where it could go quite nicely:



Then I started thinking about the smallest of our regular visitors, and how much she likes 'toys' of all description, and thought that perhaps this wasn't quite such a good idea. So I sorted out the contents of the white shelves, and moved them to the empty one above the children's books:


Then the colouring pencils (in a tin) and some paper for children's use, and a couple of old glove puppets I found, fit rather nicely in the white shelves:


All of which is very satisfactory... and leaves me with much to ponder. God supplies not just what we need, sometimes, but what we want - and in this case, what we didn't even know that we wanted. I am quite sure we would not have chosen these exact bookcases if we had gone to the Thrift Shop, or even Ikea. We would have discussed for ages what we might possibly buy, and probably not come to any conclusions. Yet these three bookcases that were available are, as we have found, perfect for the space we had, and look absolutely right. The Great Designer apparently doesn't mind our increasing acquisition of books, which is very reassuring.

At the same time, it's slightly concerning to think just how easily we have assimilated three new bookcases into a house where we didn't think there was room for any more... and how quickly the shelves have been filled.