Ideas for Styling your Shelves

I could have just as easily called this post getting your house ready to sell, or how to stage your home yourself, but I thought I would keep it easy and focus on the area I in fact 100% (or 99.9%) staged myself.

You see April was a busy month for us and it was reflected in the small amount of outfit posts I did for the blog. We were cleaning and packing and purging. Basically doing everything we could ourselves to get our house ready to sell.

Before we started this project our built in shelves that surround the fire place were filled mostly with family photos, craft supplies (markers, paper, past projects) and general mess.

One of the things you hear when staging your home for resale is to limit the amount of family pictures. The idea behind this is because you want the potential buyers to picture themselves in your home and it is harder to do this when there are pictures of you and your family all over the place. I did have a few family pictures up stairs, but none on the main floor.

Once I had cleaned off the shelves I selected items from around the house that I could use in my styling and figure out what I needed to fill the gaps.

Because I had packed away all my framed photos of my children, what I had left for my shelves was more nick nacks (like my dogs), pottery plus other items that felt more like filler and I knew I needed to invest in some prints and frames to finish the look.

I also borrowed some of my moms paintings and took a trip to Homesense to fully get my shelves styled. The prints are from Indigo (also found them here and here and here). Keep in mind that note cards usually fit well into a 4 x 6 frame and are an inexpensive decor item!

Once I had the stuff, I had to arrange it so that it looked like something out of a magazine and not just a bunch of junk on a shelf. These are the things I kept in mind when styling my shelves:

1. Symmetry is key.
2. Don’t make a shelf too cluttered. 3 items generally work to fill the space.
3. Varry the way you organize items. If one shelf has big, small, big items, reverse this on the next shelf. Varry shelf heights as well.
4. Group smaller items together in a tighter vignette to create the look of a bigger item.
5. Keep the colour pallet so that everything goes, but don’t feel that you have to match.

I really like how everything turned out. I now have some fun prints to hang in my office and an proud of myself that I re-purposed many things from around our home in a WAY better way than we had been using them in the past.

Scroll and click to shop the items found on or inspired by my shelves:

Do you have any tips for styling bookcase shelves? Share them in the comments!