Styled Office Bookshelves

As part of staging our home for showings and to do some early packing, I decided to style the bookshelves in the Office (used to be dining room).

We were able to box up all almost all of Eric's books for the move and I arranged the bookshelves with cookbooks, a few of Eric's books that he was using frequently and decor items we had on hand. I wasn't quite ready to pack the cookbooks yet since we were still making meals and coming up with meal plans so I thought I might need them. Although in reality I probably could have paired it down to a couple but I did need something to decorate the shelves with too :)

The key was putting items at various places on the shelves and having varying heights - not having it be consistent or uniform. So on one shelf having books vertical to the left with a decor item on the right and then on a different shelf having books stacked horizontal in the middle with a decor item on top of them, etc. And clustering decor items together. I am by no means an expert at this but I think they turned out quite nicely considering I didn't buy anything new.

Here is what they looked like before. They were of course much more packed but they needed to hold all of Eric's books to be functional.

Here is another shot of the office as a whole with the updated bookshelves. It's really the first thing prospective buyers saw when walking in the front door (it's also where the house flyers were kept on his desk) so I think this was a good decision on our part. Ideally the big monitor wouldn't be there but again we still had to keep some functionality for Eric while we were trying to sell.

 

Have you been doing any styling of shelves lately? Any other tips to share? I shared some great examples here.