The winning Book Nook design by Xerxes and Lilly Steirer
This summer Jeanette Sanchez and other Edgewater residents involved in the Edgewater Book Nook project ran a contest to design the next Book Nook to go up in town. Book Nooks, also known as Little Libraries, are put up by residents in their front yards and offer a space for people to take or a give a book. Click here to see where Book Nooks are located around Edgewater.
The contest offered the winner a $150 gift card from Ace Hardware to make their dream design a reality.
The winning design was by Xerxes and Lilly Steirer and their children.
Here is the description of the Book Nook from the Steirers:
Our Garden to Book Nook combines our family’s love of reading with our joy of gardening and cooking. The main section of the book nook will be a repurposed kitchen cabinet with a clear window. The surrounding sides of the cabinet will be reclaimed wood we hope to salvage. The roof will come from roofing materials leftover from another project. At the base of the slanted roof, we will install a small rain water harvesting system that will feed into a drip line to water the two garden boxes along each side of the box.
The sides of the book nook will have a chalkboard for messages and we will include seasonal gardening tips and quotes.
Our main focus of the exchange is for books. We have tons of garden books, cookbooks and children’s books to stock it with to get us started. However, we will also add a small seed box exchange that we will be repurposing from a seed box we had when we first started gardening (our own box is much larger now!) The base of the Book Nook will be a raised bed with a small demonstration garden. Hanging off the side we hope to add a small bird feeder.
To continue with the exchange idea, tucked into the top of the box, there will be a place to leave or take garden tools and things such as small pots, garden tags and tools.
In the spring, we will put up a sign encouraging those with extra seedlings aka plant starts to drop them off and for others to pick up the homeless plants.
Our children helped with the design and will continue to help with its creation including putting the book nook together, painting and planting the surrounding gardens and flower boxes.
Joel has been a resident of Edgewater, Colorado with his family since 2012. He is the Executive Director of local education nonprofit Edgewater Collective and Editor of the Edgewater Echo.
What a thoughtful, creative, delightful, and just plain wonderful book nook design!! Wow!