My Neighborhood Library Box

You guys.

On Mother’s Day this year, Chris and the kids gave me the best gift EVER. For weeks, they had been secretly building me a neighborhood library box for our yard!

Have you guys seen these before? Do you have one of your own? I am obsessed with them now! There is an entire registry online where you can find ones close to your own neighborhood! If you haven’t looked in your area, go look now! They are the cutest!

The whole idea is that you put books in them and then your neighbors can take them and leave their own! I have been AMAZED at the popularity of ours. All I did was put a post up in our neighborhood Next Door app and ever since then, there has been a constant stream of people at our little library! There are even LINES sometimes! Like, families will be LINED UP waiting to leave or borrow books!

When we put it up on Mother’s Day, this was how many books I put in it:

And this is how many books have been donated…

We have had so many that I have to go out there once a day to make room for people to see books and leave others. Now, I have this bookshelf in my garage to hold all the books that won’t fit in the little mailbox and then every few days, I rotate books out so that people always have a fresh selection. We have a solid collection of adult, youth, and children’s books at any time.

ISN’T THAT CRAZY?!?!?! My little English teacher heart is so happy!!!

This past weekend, Gracie and I decided to take our little library up a notch and we added a jar with homemade bookmarks.

To make them, I took a piece of cardboard from our recycling bin and cut out strips into bookmark sizes.

Then, we took all of our colorful washi and duct tape and covered the bookmarks.

Then, we decorated them with stickers from my craft supply, punched holes in them, and threaded ribbon through the tops. They came out super cute!

I put them in a glass jar with a lid and made sure to put a clear label on them so people knew they could take them. So far, they have been really popular with the kids in the neighborhood. I love watching them pick out a book and then dig out their favorite bookmark to go with it!

Our little neighborhood library has been so popular that Chris is getting ready to make a second one just for kids books. We will put this one at a lower height so that kids can reach it better. Our neighbors have joked that we need a fiction one and a nonfiction one and a mystery one… 🙂

I don’t have a building plan to give you because Chris made this with whatever he happened to have in his scrap piles, but if you search “Little Neighborhood Libraries” on Pinterest, there are a ton you can use if you’re interested in making your own. I highly recommend it! Especially during a quarantine!

Thank you to Chris and my babies for feeding my reading hobby and turning our yard into a place that grows community readers!