Hi!  I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday and are reveling in the glow of spending time with loved ones.

I wanted to give you all a little taste of what my apartment used to look like.  While unfortunately I was too embarrassed ever to take any photos of my apartment when it was in its full-mess mode, here is an accidental shot taken of my bookshelf in the background.  This is only one of the two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves I had that was crammed with books, papers and tons of other stuff.  Notice that each shelf has two layers of books, one behind the other!  I used to try to make it look neater by constantly taking things out and moving them around - it's a little sad to think about now. 

 

Scary shelves in my old studio

Here's another one that shows more of the cluttered surfaces in my apartment.  There was also a lot of furniture for such a small space;  other than the two bookshelves I also had a table and chairs and a 6'L x 3'D desk.  Crazy, huh? And yep, that's me in the very bright red jacket.  Probably trying to figure out where I can put more stuff ;-)

Hmm, now where did I put that?

For perspective, here are my bookshelves now.   One is in the living room and also houses our computer, printer and some bins which I will talk about in a later post, and the others are in the bedroom. To be fair, I now live with someone so at least half are not mine.   Though it's definitely a work in progress for both of us as we continue to pare things down.

Living Room

Bedroom

Even better that there is still more than enough space to display a few decorative items that are meaningful to us.   Happy shelves!