Who doesn't want their own library?

If you've met me for any period of time, you will soon understand that I am a book lover through and through...

I love new books and old books and classic books and graphic books, I could go on but I ran out of rhymes. 😂

One of the first things I do when I move somewhere new is try to get out all my books. It's like meeting old friends when I pull them out of boxes. We had quite the setup of bookshelves in our previous home and I miss them everyday!

I love books so much that we even bought my childhood library that was for sale and turned it into an Airbnb for the community. I have such fond memories of my time there! It was a small town library, but I read everything and anything I could get my hands on. When they built the new library in town, I was actually able to buy a lot of the books that I had read as a child, which still had my number in many of them. ❤️

One of the first things that I start planning in a new home is where will the books go? I use Ikea Billy bookcases as a place marker until custom bookcases are in the budget and even measure a room if it's a 6, 8 or 10 Billy bookcase room.

After we flipped the farmhouse layout, the next order of business is where will the books go? We homeschool currently, so we needs lots and lots of space for my book collection and our homeschool book collection.

Luckily, the farmhouse had plenty of room for expansion. You can see we are expanding a room to the south of the farmhouse. The room off the living room will be our library. At first, we were just going to use a crawl space for a foundation, but we also had a need for an office for Jon as he works from home. So we decided to put a full basement foundation under the library for Jon's office.

I'm probably most excited about this change to the layout, after the new kitchen layout!

I've just put in some rough placeholders for furniture and book cases at the moment, but will be designing the interior elevations very soon.

Here are some pictures in progress:

Complete with a little boy who just can't resist the dirt ❤️

We've found some interesting things when we started digging. You can definitely tell that there used be an old house located next to the farmhouse as the foundation became visible when we dug the foundation hole.

You can see old brick at first and then as the video pans around, you can see concrete block foundation. It was very common on this farmsteads to build a new house next to the old one and then burn the old one. It's really fun to think of the possibilities of what the old house looked like...almost like a little archeological dig!