I never thought a shelf could make me so happy.

Since moving back to Jackson, where we live in a house and not a tiny shoebox, I have gotten really into decorating our home. I loved researching and dreaming and doing what little I could in Boston, but having walls that I can actually nail into and more than one bookshelf to squeeze our book collection onto ... it's great. And since we moved rental homes over the summer, we have even more room than at our previous house. We also have two bookshelves in the big main room. The first thing I really decorated in this house is one of these bookshelves.

I love this bookshelf. I lurve it. I flurve it.

Which is a good thing, because it directly faces our main sofa, it is next to our TV stand and it's the first thing most people see when they come through our front door. So it's a pretty visible shelf.

Everything on it makes me happy, but I picked a few things to point out.

1. I'm trying to tone down my obsession with having frames photos all over the place—Brian prefers a more toned-down look, so I'm trying to be more thoughtful about which photos I display and how. We only have two photos from our wedding up in the house, and this is one of them. It's of Brian's fraternity lifting him up and chanting at the reception. It's a perfect shot.

2. I'm working on a collection of globes for our house. This one, the first of three, has been in my family for at long as I can remember—it still says Soviet Union instead of Russia and things like that. My mom brought it all the way from Salt Lake City the last time she visited.

3. Another theme in our house: ampersands. I am veritably obsessed. This one is a bit hard to see in the photo. You can see it fine in real life. The yarn-wrapped bottles behind it are DIY table decorations from my wedding.

4. This shelf is mostly open. We stick laptops, Brian's med school books, phones, etc. on it. If I've learned one thing about myself, its that I need space to just put things sometimes. It looks (a little) less cluttered if I leave a specific space for that. The floral tray next to the laptop is a place to drop mail.

5. Seven matching baskets to hold DVDs might seem excessive, and it is. But damn do they look nice.

6. ZOMG YOU GUYS LET'S TALK ABOUT THESE BOOKS. I have wanted to make a book spectrum (a reading rainbow if you will? kudos to one of Brian's fraternity brothers for that one) for a while, and this shelf gave me the perfect opportunity. It's big enough but not crazy huge. I pull out boxes and boxes of books and picked the ones with nearly solid-colored spines, then just tweaked until I loved it. All the credit in the world to my husband for watching me painstakingly put this up without saying a word.

I'd like to share more of our home in the coming weeks, but I should probably clean a wee bit first. Maybe wash some dishes. Maybe.