You Know Roy? Color Coded Bookshelves

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Roy G. Biv. Gotta love him, right? Such an inspirational man. So many great deeds done in his life. So many people helped.

Eer. Wait. What's that you say? He wasn't a real man? He's just a fictitious acronym my teachers invented to teach me the colors of the rainbow? BLASPHEMY! 

When we moved in, we decided to not only color block our bookshelves (which we did in the last apartment, too), but also put everything in rainbow order. Enter Roy G. Biv.

You see, we started out with this...

I know. They look sad. And color-less. Not to mention the random grocery and laundry basket next to it with odd computer cords hanging out...

Finally, we decided to give it some life. Before putting anything on those beautiful shelves, we laid it all out on the floor. I started by loosely color coding in an arc around the spot where I sat... (Kind of looked like me in college, studying for a test)

I based the color coding not on the front of the book, but instead on its spine. Why? Because it's what you see when the book is on a bookshelf, silly!

Each time I withdrew a book from the seemingly endless boxes, I placed as close to its family as I could. Granted, as I mentioned before, this color coding on the floor was fairly loose. I just wanted them near their basic color block.

Finally, I had something that looked like this (though there were many more books).

When I was finally ready to start shelving things, I played around a bit. At first, I planned to start with black on top and end with purples/browns at the end, moving/slinking horizontally throughout the rows of shelves as I added books in between. Here's an idea of how that strategy started:

It looked pretty...

But I ended up opting to do it a bit more sneakily. Because for some reason I enjoy making it a little more secretive. Like, how cool will it be when some random friend comes over and says, "Oh yeah, I forgot you Roy G. Biv'ed your bookshelves!" You know what that tells me? That awesome badass chick reads my blog. Boom. Double best friends.

So, for the good old before-and-after phenomenon (one of these days, I WILL try phenomenon right on my first try! And omg there it was. So... second try), here is the naked bookshelf:

And here's the beautiful, Roy G. Biv'd bookshelf (Yes, Roy G Biv'd is a verb - wait, crap, maybe not. Move on).

Yay! Looking for more posts about my obsession with my apartment? Tutorials and images and house things, oh my? Check out my house&home page, where there's now an interactive map you can use to navigate rooms! It's like Harry Potter magic!