Are you someone who loves to read? Many book lovers find books taking over their homes and their lives. While books are a lovely addition to a home, in excess they stop adding charm and start feeling like clutter. If you’re in this situation, here are some suggestions to help you manage.

Read and release. Set a box in an unobtrusive spot in your home. After you read a book, ask yourself if you will ever want to read it again. If the answer is no, place the book right in that box. Once the box is full, take it to a used bookstore or donate it to a library or thrift shop.

Share with other book lovers. If you have a friend or family member who loves mysteries as much as you do, make arrangements to pass along your books once you’ve finished with them. They will be grateful and you will have fewer books.

Schedule a book review. With several boxes handy, look through each bookshelf and remove any books you won’t want to read again. Distribute those books among several categories: donate, sell, or give to friends and family.

Separate your reference books. You may have books that you use regularly for your work or hobbies. Separate those from other books and keep them organized in one place. That way you won’t be constantly passing over them when deciding which books to donate.

Add shelves. If you have sorted and removed all the books you can and you still have piles around the house, consider adding either purchased or built-in bookshelves. You don’t want your books to be clutter. Instead, create a way to enjoy them and let them add personality to your home.

Fresh flowers are a wonderful touch in any room in the home.  They can add a beautiful fragrance to a room as well as color and pattern.  A small bunch of flowers in the powder room or next to the bed in the guest room is a wonderful way to welcome guests.  Little touches like fresh flowers can add a lovely accent for not a lot of money. Here are some of our other favorite little touches.

For the bathroom, put lotions, q-tips, cotton balls, and extra bars of soap in glass jars.  Display these on a shelf or on the counter. It will make your bathroom feel less cluttered to have a uniform look to the storage.

For the kitchen, organize flours and pastas into glass or ceramic storage containers. You can keep these on the counter or shelf, if you have room, or in the pantry cupboard.  Use fruits and fresh vegetables in a bowl on the counter to add a pop of color to the room.

By the front door, or kitchen door, place a tray for boots and wet umbrellas. This will save your floors from moisture and dirt.  This way guests will know to remove their wet shoes and boots rather than track mud and water through the house.

If you are having guests over, place a few snacks on the Kitchen Island or coffee table for them to munch on when they arrive. A pitcher of ice water and glasses on the counter invites them to serve themselves if they are thirsty.

Many people have a season they prefer over all others. For some, fall brings to mind the magic when trees first change colors and then lose their leaves and the weather starts to snap. Others love winter with the opportunity to ski and play in the snow. Spring has its own magic when trees blossom and spring flowers bloom.

For those that love the summer, with lots of sunshine and weather that ranges from warm to warmer to too warm, this room helps carry the season with it all year round.

The first summer choice comes from the bright yellow paint on the walls. Yellow is a really tricky color to get right. You want it to remind you of flowers or sunshine, but with the wrong choice your room can look like the inside of an egg yolk. Take the time to test out several choices on your walls before making your final choice. Remember, an entire room of yellow will look darker than a small sample.

This couple chose white for the fireplace, bookshelves and molding. A white ceiling is also a good decision. With yellow and white together, this room looks even more like summer. The mid-range color on the wood floors also helps to create a fresh look. A dark floor would bleach out the look of the room, and too light a floor wouldn’t provide that much-needed contrast. If you want to go with yellow, think about that color choice as you select flooring and other permanent fixtures.

A neutral couch and clean-lined coffee table let the yellow stay the focus of the room, and a few casual yellow elements bring the wall color throughout the space. Spots of green and red – added in a natural way with fresh flowers and plants – echo the summer theme. With the right color and design choices, you can have a summer home all year long.

Now that you’ve put away your holiday decorations, before you put your home accessories right back where you had them, how about taking a few minutes to rethink your table tops?

Nothing makes a room feel stale more than having the same arrangement of accessories placed in the same places year in and year out. With everything mixed up due to the holidays, along with the start of a new year, now is the perfect time to take a fresh approach to your coffee and side tables.

To start, place all of your home accessories on your dining room table. Look at the large pieces that are left. Do you want to move that lamp? Would this side table look better at the other end of the room? The functional goal for small tables involves providing a place to put a glass from every seat in your living room. Do your tables meet that goal?

Once you’ve sorted your large pieces, take the time to consider where your accessories will fit. In this photo, the woman uses this side table for her cup, newspaper and phone. Therefore it’s smart to have one strong accessory, such as this plant, rather than several elements that would constantly get in the way.

Tables that don’t receive heavy use can handle more elements. Remember to combine different heights, and when possible set up your accessories in groups of three or five – odd numbers are more appealing. When you rearrange things, your home looks fresher and your treasured home décor selections will pop in their new locations.

Spring gardening may still be several months away for most of us. This doesn’t mean that you can’t start to dream and plan your summer garden. Soon enough it will be time to start seeds indoors for those summer flowers and vegetables.  If you can’t wait for seedlings, you can always start a small herb or lettuce garden on your window sill.

This kitchen has the typical window right above the kitchen sink.  If the sill is wide enough, this makes an ideal spot to start seedlings or have a container for lettuce and herbs.  You’ll be able to monitor the progress every time you are at the sink, and this will help you remember to water the plants.  Should you not have room on the sill but have counter space in a sunny spot, you can have an herb garden there too. Be mindful of water from the pots or container leaking onto the countertops, especially if you have butcher block wood counter tops.  Placing a tray underneath the pots can help prevent spills.

Placing seedlings or an herb garden on the floor should be avoided if you have pets or small children. Cats are notorious for eating house plants and herbs are no exception.  It’s best to keep your little kitchen garden up off the floor and on a counter or sill.

If you have two rooms that open one to another, you can use color to coordinate the space. Today’s trend of open floor plans mean that living rooms, dining rooms, family rooms and kitchens may all open into another room. Coordinating color between the rooms does not mean that you have to exactly match wall colors and surfaces between the rooms. Playing off a coordinating color palette allows you to mix up the colors to create a flow of design for both spaces.

This home is a nice example of using color to create flow between the foyer, living room and family room beyond.  Red and warm grey can be seen in all three rooms in different shades and on different surfaces. Using these colors in all three rooms unifies the three spaces, making them feel part of the same design plan.

In the foyer the red of the Chinese lacquer chest is carried onto the area rug, which also has a warm gray in it.  The area rug is repeated in the living room, where the sofa is covered in a similar grey to the rug. The red in the rug is then picked up in the chair upholstery in the family room.  White and brown, from the wood accents, are also used in all three spaces.

Carrying the same colors throughout the spaces moves your eye from room to room and gives the entire design a cohesive and polished look.  Limiting the color palette to three or four colors will also help the flow between spaces.

Today’s families are on the go more than ever. Getting the whole gang together for a family meal can be challenging with everyone’s busy schedules.  The majority of American families do not eat every dinner together during the week. Does this sound familiar?

Involving the whole family in making dinner can be a fun activity, and it just might help get your kids to eat their vegetables.

Family cooking school can be something as easy as make your own pizzas from scratch or letting the kids help with taco night. If you have small children, getting them interested in cooking is a great way to get them interested in healthy food from a young age. Older kids and teens can be in charge of designing a menu and even shopping for ingredients. You could even divide up into teams to do the best of cooking competition—with prizes.

Set up your kitchen to make prep and clean up quick and simple. If you are working with little kids, things can get messy so protect your floors and counters. This can mean moving the runner out of the way or putting down a drop cloth if things are really messy.  Messy is fine. Remember this is a fun activity for the family as well as a way to get dinner on the table.

As we meet up with our puzzled homeowner again, he is considering two paint options – the left option on the fan is actually a very dark gold. You can see the color’s origin when you look at the lighter shades and they appear almost yellow.

His second choice is among selections one, two, or three on the other visible color row. He doesn’t want to use the darker choices because they would blend in too much with the fireplace opening and the black trim on the windows.

This is a good first step, but if he heads right to the paint store and orders one of these, he is almost guaranteed to be disappointed for two reasons. Paint chips are printed and the dyes on the paper don’t match the dyes that make up the paint. This means that the color you see on a chip will not exactly match the color of the paint you buy.

The second reason comes from how the light comes into your home. Everything from the direction of your windows to the shape of a room will affect how a paint color will look on a wall, and different walls will make the color look different – sometimes darker or lighter, but sometimes even a different color. To see this, look at a corner where two walls and the ceiling meet. It’s likely that you will see three different tones, even if everything was painted the same color.

So our guy has to go to the paint store and pick up samples of the colors he’s debating about – and maybe a couple of others that are similar, along with an inexpensive foam brush for each color. Then once home, he needs to paint each wall with at least a one foot by one foot square of each color – leaving some space between the colors so they don’t reflect on each other. (If this bothers you, paint some white poster boards and tape them on the walls.)

As a final step, he needs to live with his choices for a few days, looking at them in the morning, afternoon and evening, and with natural light as well as with the home’s evening lighting. Over a short period of time, he will know which one he will be happiest living with. Paint is a very personal choice. It’s worthwhile to take the time to select what will work best for you.

When you have a room with neutral carpeting, simple moldings and no architectural features, your choice of wall color can be based on personal preferences without much if any reference to what is in the room. But in the case of the man in the photo, it’s more complicated.

Paint in this case has to work with the off-white stone and black opening of the fireplace, black trim in the room as well as the varied shades of brown making up the wood floor. Then he may have some furniture that will be going in the room as well as an area rug or two.

From the paint selection fan in his hand, it’s clear that he hasn’t yet narrowed down his choices. Realistically, the first step is deciding what specific color he likes. With this set-up, he could go light or dark, mid-tones and almost any color.

The trick will be getting just the right version of his preferences. Too dark and the floor and fireplace will stand out like a beacon. Paint it too light or neutral, the color of the wall currently, and nothing will come into focus.

Suppose we start with a brown – dark enough to blend with the richer tones of the wood floor while still light enough to keep the room from feeling gloomy. The floor has warm tones and the fireplace tones are cool, so the brown needs to balance cool and warm to work well with both pieces. To begin, this man needs to narrow his focus to several possible browns that meet these criteria. In part two, we’ll talk about how to go from the paint fan to the final color.