Sometime, quite early on, we decided to organise little gosling’s space the Montessori way. It was not easy, nor terribly accessible as foreigners in a faraway land and living in an expat bubble to find good bargains. There was no Ikea and the furniture market was ridiculously expensive. So, my husband started DIY-ing whatever pieces of furniture we needed for the baby (and more); a very cool hobby for him and an incredibly useful one for the family ;). It came out beautifully, if you ask me. 

Little gosling’s pea-green book bin was one of the last additions, before we changed continents again. It’s a model based on something I had seen on Pinterest, that my husband then rescaled and made sturdier. I chose the colour (we had already explored the mustard yellow and turquoise for other pieces of furniture; we left before he could build something purple). I love it so much; such a happy, bright colour.  It makes me feel good every time I see it. We set it up in little gosling’s room when he was almost 17 months old and placed all the books we had at the time (that we had previously kept on low shelves, next to his toys) inside. Little gosling came in and was initially thrown back by it; he’s always been resistant to change. However, he quickly started browsing through the books like a pro. 

What we like about this book bin is that it has allowed little gosling from the beginning to browse through it on his own, whilst seeing the full cover of each book and do this effortlessly whilst standing. It’s very visual and he can easily recognise books by the cover. Daddy also made sure it had sufficient capacity and can hold a good number of books; little gosling has access to the largest number of books possible at all times. It is a flexible, friendly and easy to use means of storage for books. Little gosling gets on average half of the books out on any given day and it takes him only a couple of minutes to put them back in. Whichever way he places them back in, they’ll look good. 

Now I am on the lookout for a complementary storage system, for books he grows out of or just to facilitate rotation of books. Preferably an equally user-friendly for toddlers and young children model and one that does not need fixing in the wall. DIYing our way out of this will not be possible due to lack of any workshop space and we hold on to the hope that we won’t need to paint the apartment when we move out… Luckily, we now live in a country with Ikea :P.