Books

They say there are 5 stages of grief, and there may also be 5 stages of buying nothing.

We have books all over our house ... in the garage (in boxes and on shelves), in closets, in baskets, lying on top of each other, lying next to each other, you get the idea.  We will never get our house in order until we do something about these books, most of which we'd like to keep.  As I discussed this problem with my wife, our first solution (of course) was to buy some bookshelves.  Of course, I said.  I never said we would buy nothing, just that we would think over every purchase with extreme prejudice.

From buying shelves we then moved on to making some really nice ones (the second step of buying nothing). Of course, we would have to buy some nice wood, etc., but that is just what we have to do.

The third step of buying nothing was making some adequate shelves with wood I have lying on the floor of the garage. We'd only need to buy $20 worth of hardware.  Here is the design I picked out.

The 4th step was my wife saying that we need to build tall bookshelves rather than horizontal ones (see the 6x6 design in the comments section at the above link), because that will store more books.  OK, that will require more hardware, but it will still be worth it.

Now for the 5th step of buying nothing, in which we (drum roll) actually buy nothing.  As I was getting dressed this morning, I noticed that we have about 32 feet of unused or underutilized sturdy shelf space in our walk in closet.  Maybe not the long-term solution we need for our books, but for the year of buying nothing, I think it will do just fine.