If we have a lot of books, it can be hard to organise them properly. Decluttering might not be the easiest philosophy if you need a lot of books and reference material for your work or study. Life can be pretty challenging trying to organise all your frequently used resources and notes. On this page we look at a trick that organisers have up their sleeves, they hide clutter (in the sense that it is hard for certain items look organised, we clearly don’t suggest you keep actual clutter). Here we will hide visual bookshelf clutter.

Hiding bookshelf clutter is a great beginners project

Organising books tends to be a nice, safe organising project in which you can hone your organising skills.

In this video, I show you how to organise books

In the video above I focus on the bookshelf of a challenging room.

I show how

To create the feeling of a library
Shuffle furniture around
Created zones in the bookshelves
Make it suit our needs

If you want to see what else we did in this room have a look at this page help declutter my home.

Step by step process how to organise your books

A past organising workshop student contacted me, she needed help to organise her books for her teaching work.

We started by looking at her situation:

It was a spare room with

Lots of notes
Material based on student year groups
Many books
And additional teaching resources

How will we organise these books references and hide the bookshelf clutter?

It isn't as hard as it looks, provided we go through a step by step process.

Organise books - Step 1 - Declutter

Firstly before we organise, we need to declutter. Are there any books that are of no use to us anymore? Pass them on, books are some of those great treasures to pass on to others. If you really enjoyed a book why not give it to your local charity shop and spread the love, the book has now the potential to be enjoyed by many people.

Organise books – Step 2 - groupings

The second thing to do when organising our books is grouping

We need to group our books in (for us) logical groups. This could be by size or colour but for most of us “not so organised people” we think in overall concepts. Like study books; past or current study books. Other examples are; books belonging to my hobbies, novels, cookbooks etc. the list is endless.

Organise books – Step 3 – easy access

Third step when we organise books - easy access

If we have a range of different books for work or study that are frequently used, we need to make sure we have easy access to them. This means, that for a lot of us, our books should stand on their sides, or lay flat on top of each other. This way we can see the books, they are already categorised (see step 2) and we can easily access them and put them back (very important!).

We need to look at the volume of books and the shelving we have available.

If we have sufficient shelving as is shown in our situation above, I would use some form of markers to section of different areas and different groups that we already organised earlier in step 2.

Grouping difficult things

If you want to learn how I group difficult things together have a look at this video:

How to hide bookshelf clutter

Now we are left with items we want to keep and we have grouped them there are different options.

In the closet, they go:

A super simple option on how to organise bookshelf clutter is putting square boxes in a wardrobe (similarly to what I suggest in how to organise your closet).

Canvas boxes

If you can't hide book self clutter behind a door we have some other options; canvas boxes or turning the book space in a work of art.

I like to use canvas boxes as they are so versatile and come in different shapes and sizes. The benefit with canvas boxes is when you put only grouped books together you can pick up all related books in one movement- just lift out the box. Some magazine holders can possibly also be used, if some of your material is either not that much to make a big group of items, or if it is flimsy material.

If certain books or references look messy you can use the canvas box as a way to hide the (organised) messy area (yes there is such a thing as an “organised messy area”). The book area tends to look calmer with some books stored in boxes.

And you will still know exactly where items are that you need - you are organised.

Make it artistic

An additional idea to canvas boxes is:

Have some books horizontal and some books vertical so you can still see a clear distinction between your groupings.
Get smaller containers for knick-knacks you want to keep (clearly I would firstly urge you to declutter them).
To use DVD storage solutions – often books and DVD’s are attracted to the same area, using some novel storage solution can hide the bookshelf clutter and make the whole space look more interesting.