I got in touch with Liz and Emily Cottrill (now Emily Kiser) and asked how to get started. They got me connected to the Yahoo group for private lending libraries (now at groups.io), where I became acquainted with Kristi Stansfield, who got me started going to the Booksaver warehouse sales in Hagerstown. I attended the local homeschool conference in 2014 as a vendor: “Hello! I’m going to have this library in the fall. . . It’s going to be great. . . No, you can’t see it yet.”
We set up bookcases at one end of our walk-in basement, the end with the door. Over the years the library space worked its way around until it took up two thirds of the basement. My husband built nice brick steps to get people safely down and around the house, but on snowy days I had people come in the kitchen door and down the basement stairs so they wouldn’t slip and die. Our one bathroom was on the main floor, so anyone who needed it got to traverse the entire house. I had a baby monitor set up for when my kids were napping, but it wasn’t reliable, so I would occasionally come to a growing realization that someone was screaming upstairs. https://plumfieldandpaideia.com/the-genesis-of-covenant-family-library-elizabeth-jones-librarian/