College Textbook Room

If you are a natural organizer, you would love Africa!  Since arriving here at the college, I (Sarah) have been “introduced” to many closets and rooms that are in desperate need of organizing.  The root problem to all these over cluttered rooms and closets is that people don’t throw away ANYTHING and getting the permission to throw things away here can be difficult.  Thus, as you can image that after many months (and years) of not throwing anything away results in rooms and closets built up with lots and lots of “stuff”.  One of my projects when I arrived was to clean out and reorganize the college textbook room. In addition to textbooks, the room housed things like bags of clothes, a broken defibrillator machine, hand saws, discontinued textbooks, typewriters (which haven’t been used in years) and not one but two broken copy machines.  There was so much stuff in the room that it was hard to walk into the room without tripping over something that didn’t belong in the room.  In September I started the process of throwing away the broken things, selling the usable books and getting new bookcases built with doors to prevent the dust from ruining the books.  At the end of May, I completed what seemed like the impossible in September.  The clutter has been removed, the textbooks have been reorganized, new, laminated labels and signs have been created and a database has been established to record all the textbooks in stock.  It was a huge project and took many, many months to complete but now it is done and it looks great! 


Here are some before and after pictures.