When you walk through our front door, standing in the foyer, look to your left. Our home library is the room you see. You can see other rooms by visiting my “decor” page and selecting a room to tour. This blog is a work in progress, one room per post.
(click on photo to enlarge it)

We painted the room green, built the bookshelves, sewed the curtains, covered all the chairs.

The bookshelves cover an entire wall, however, despite recently donating most of my novels, we still have WAY TOO MANY books to fit onto the bookshelves. Right now, we have a couple stacks of books that are four feet tall beside the shelves, all of my cookbooks are kept in the kitchen, etc. We have plans to build a couple more sets of shelves soon. Really soon.

What’s on the bookshelves? Well, my rolls of sign vinyl are on the bottom, then a row of kid books, then reference books, gardening books, decorating, DIY, college textbooks, Mitch’s childhood encyclopedia set, and books that have passed to me by family. Sounds like a lot of books? Nope. Not nearly as many as some of my family members.

Just like in the rest of the house, I keep real plants anywhere I can reach them, and i only use artificial plants for areas I can only reach with a ladder. (10 foot ceilings, here)

Here’s the top of the bookshelves: (click to enlarge)

Here are a couple views around the room: showing the bookshelf wall; big birdcage hanging in front of the windows; elephant and bird collection that sits on top of the armoire that holds my Summa sign cutter; our wacky old sewing chair with built-in storage that we found at a thrift market and re-upholstered: (click to enlarge)

Here are a few more views around the room: the industrial file cabinets that I’ve labeled for myself and our girls to keep their schoolwork through the years and vital records (the other four drawers on the 2nd file cabinet are on my “to do” list); the 1930s “satellite” chair that we re-upholstered; aloe vera and houseplants; fountain; decorative pieces: (click to enlarge)

Here are a few more views around the room: the diamond fabric covered screen/shroud hides my old metal steel tanker desk, so that you’re not looking at the backside of the computer/printer/hub/etc; our chrome glass-topped “Sputnik” table for our daughters’ afternoon homework with our chrome chairs from the 70s, topped by a tray that holds a few essentials for homework; a close-up of the fabric of our floor-to-ceiling curtains that I sewed: (click to enlarge)

Like I said, I got rid of most of my novels and just read on my iPad via iBooks or NOOKapp, now. However, when it comes to “look books,” I doubt technology will ever be able to replace how I feel about being able to sit down, open up, and spread out several books at once the way I do. It’s kind of my quiet time to regenerate creative energies. Surprisingly, blogging and visiting so many blogs lately seems to be having this same effect, sparking my creativity…
(click to enlarge)

That concludes our tour of this room! You’ll notice i didnt show you my desktop. Well, its piled high with papers, magazines, the girls’ stuff from school, and MORE at the moment. If I clear it off anytime soon, I’m sure I’ll probably be proud enough to write a post about it! Lol. Second, I may re-edit this post at a later day just to add a few “behind the scenes” photos to the end of this post that show the “before” shots of the chairs and the “during” bookshelf building.

Enjoy my projects or links? Please, pin it, tweet it, like it, whatever… just be social and feel free to share as long it links back to here! Also, if you do feature this room in some way on your blog/site/’zine, please let me know, and I’ll add your link into this post!

Later! (more photos at the bottom of this post!)
See you in blogland!
Your Friend,
~Amber Hamilton Henson

PS This room of ours is looking forward to the party circuit!! The daily links:
Catch as Catch Can #90 @ My Repurposed Life
Link Party and Mes Preferes #73 @ ReDoux Interiors
PotPourri Party #42 @ 2805
Inspiration Friday #83 @ AtThePicketFence
What’s Cluckin’ #21 @ ChickenScratchNY
Wow Us Wednesday #86 @ SavvySouthernStyle

The individual / detail photos in no particular order: