By Josette Keelor — Daily Staff Writer

Looking forward to curling up with a good book this fall? How about in your very own library?

Having a cozy, quiet reading spot in your home could be just a bookcase and an armchair away, but local residents say the perfect retreat is all about atmosphere.

Ted Ahrens, of Frederick County, built his home library because he has more books than he cares to count.

"I love books, and I got some from my dad," he says.

Over the years, the piles of books grew taller. When he began the job of displaying the books, though, Ahrens underestimated his collection.

Last year, after moving with his wife from Gaithersburg, Md., into a house on the edge of Lake Frederick, he had several 10-foot-tall bookshelves constructed and aligned to the walls of his basement.

"I thought I'd have more than enough room here, but I didn't," he says, estimating the books would have reached the ceiling. "I thought I had fewer books."

After stocking the shelves with books of every subject — from his collection of local colonial history to his mother's French novels, which she brought from her birthplace of Geneva, Switzerland — Ahrens still had too many books to keep. This April, he donated 20 boxes of books to Bowman Library in Stephens City.

Since then he has tried to limit his collection of tomes, he says. For every new book he brings home, he rids his library of an old one, at his wife's suggestion.

Ahrens, 66, says he looked forward to having more time to spend with his book collection, reading. He recently achieved his dream, retiring from his job in operations research at the Pentagon.

If your home is lacking in extra space, just adding a few shelves could be enough to dress up a room and make it into the perfect place to unwind.

As soon as she viewed her new house, Ahrens' neighbor, Joan Coolidge, knew she wanted a home library.

"In the floor plan, this is your formal living room," she says of one of the two small rooms off the main hall in her home near Lake Frederick.

"I just don't do formal living rooms anymore," she says, explaining that in past homes, she would rarely make use of that type of space. "[I] decided it can be a library, since I work at the library and like books," says Coolidge, a library assistant at Samuels Public Library in Front Royal.

In the past, she had stored her family's collection of history books, sports biographies and novels in various spots around the house, but she says having a library makes searching for what she is trying to find more convenient. The reading room also provides a quiet place for her family to interact with their books, especially during the colder months, when one can sit in the armchair by the window, under paintings of the U.S. Capitol and the White House depicted under a blanket of snow.

"It's a nice, kind of cozy room to [use]," she says.

Finding a place for a library can be one of the most difficult decisions in the process.

"A lot of it depends on the space that you have," says Ryan Oakes, of Oakes Construction Inc., in Front Royal, who recently built a shelf about 10 inches long for a customer looking for a storage space for books.

The shelf unit, which was based on a design for a hutch, includes base cabinets on the bottom, an inner section with an open shelf, a countertop section and shelves extending to the ceiling.

"We just kind of modified it a little," he says of the original design.

Knowing where a shelf will go may help in the design, but could also pose challenges in making it fit into a pre-existing space.

"The difficulty ... would probably be about a seven," Oakes says. "It all depends on how fancy you want to go."

"They make these houses big for just one couple," Ahrens says. His partially underground basement provides enough room for all of the books as well as a reading area with two love seats, a research table surrounded by chairs, another small reading area and an office containing part of Ahrens' George Washington collection.

"Knowing that I'd have room down here sure helped," Ahrens remembers from when he and his wife chose the house. "[It was] a selling point."

"It depends sometimes on what the homeowner is looking for," says Ryan Jeirles, owner of R.J. Home Services in Boyce. Some options include staining or painting the wood, or buying wood that already has a finish.

The shelf Oakes recently built was oak, stain grade, with a light-colored stain and lacquer. He says something similar would cost about $3,000, so it is important to consider cost before beginning the project. Wall-to-wall shelves around an entire room could cost $20,000 he says.

He recommends choosing the type of material and the look you want. Stain-grade wood costs about 21/2 times more than paint grade does, he says, so it would be more economical to paint the wood rather than to stain it.

"Semigloss paint is washable," he says, which makes it easier to clean. This is the type of paint commonly used in bathrooms, he says, because it can stand up to moisture. Most other rooms in a house are coated with flat paint, which cannot be cleaned easily. If semigloss paint gets dirty, you can take a washcloth to it, he says.

Placement of the shelves will also determine how long the books will last.

"Try to keep them away from walls that have dirt behind them," Ahrens says. The shelves in his basement are on walls that do not have dirt behind them, he says, cutting down on moisture harming the books.

If your basement library will be completely underground, Ahrens recommends building the bookshelves on inside walls, which do not have dirt directly behind them.

"It all depends on the layout of the room," says Jeirles. "Bookcases are typically 12 inches deep," he says, so the homeowner will want to account for that amount of space when planning where a bookcase will go. Bookcases can also fit next to other pieces of furniture, he says, like on either side of a fireplace.

Once the bookcases are in place, the rest is deciding which books to display and how they will coordinate with other items around the room.

For a more sophisticated look to the library, classic novels and research books would be suitable; for a cozier atmosphere, a shelf of lighthearted fiction or nonfiction might do the trick.

The Internet offers various lists of titles that book-lovers might consider including in their home library, recommended by organizations like the Modern Language Association, Penguin Classic and Random House.

Some would say that every home library should include novels from these lists, but Ahrens and Coolidge agree that your personal library should be a reflection of your interests.

"Whatever they're interested in reading," Coolidge says. "That's what I do."

*Contact Josette Keelor at kjkeelor@nvdaily.com