I have built my house in Falkreath and added quite a bit of furniture. I have a kitchen, big bedroom with beds for my two daughters, a trophy room and a complete smithery in the cellar. But I am missing the odd thing:

1) I could only build one bookshelf
2) just one puppet to show armour.
3) only two shield walls in the whole of the house.

and most of all I find it frustrating, that I cannot show on any shelf items of my collection, like a be in the jar or Azuras star (which I do not use) or any other nice thingy.

Has any one a solution for me - or even better, will Bethesda alter Hearthfire accordingly ? Or does anyone know of a MOD, which could help ?

You need to add a library to get a bunch of bookshelves. You can put two in the bedrooms of a stock house. Note they say Tall Shelves, and I have not put any books in my new houses, so not sure how many of the Tall Shelves are actual bookcases.

Storage Rooms, Kitchens and Trophy Rooms allow for more tall shelves too.

Basic house build has only the 1 bookshelf unless you take the library option, seems like Nords are not big on books and listening to the guards you can guess why.

That's why I think they should have a system where similarly shaped items can go anywhere, within certain limits (so you can't put a smelter in your bedroom). If you want gobs of beds (large staff, plus spouse and kids), or bookcases, or display space, or trophies, or whatever, it should be doable. Like Burger King, "have it your way".

Indeed, though books can often be found next to latrine buckets.

For displaying items take care to arrange them around the items that are already there. It seems that those items respawn, and they can knock over your carefully placed decorations.

One suggestion for collections, build the altar base in the cellar but don’t build the shrines. Then you have a large surface to play with.

hmmm.......

If you built everything, or at least the important things, you have

2 mannequins, one upstairs in the main hall, one in the cellar.
4 shield plaques (2 in the cellar, 1 in the bedroom wing and one in the back room of the main hall)
1 weapon plaque upstairs main hall bedroom
5 weapon rack downstairs in the cellar, 4 single ones in the entryway if you remodelled the small house.
1 large display case in the main hall another if you have the entryway
7 or more small display cases
And yes the miserable sods have only given you one bookshelf with auto add options.

It is a good idea to save your game before you start building the house (keep that one for your first house) and before you start furnishing a room, if you have problems, do not like what you built or some ravenous bug ate some of your furnishings, you can always try again.

For display of jars or other large items you want on shelves, you have the two wall shelves in the back room, most of the bookshelf in the back room if you built it (leave the flute and cup there), most of the furniture and shelves in the main hall twin bedroom, a bit of space in the double bedroom. In the trophy room you can put stuff on the trophy stands, squeeze it in amongst the junk, put things in the bowls, buckets or whatever other empty containers you can find in there.The top of the cupboards at either end are a nice spot to put your bug jars, but you will need persistence to get them up there if you are not used to decorating. You will need persistence even if you are an experienced home decorator.

You could try manually putting Azura's Star in one of the large display cases, or there will be a wooden tray in the entryway/small house you could put the star and some gems in. If you built the shrine base in the cellar and not the shrines, you can use that and the tiny shelf above it to display items. The star might look good on there somewhere. There is not much on the table in the bedroom wing, you could do something with that, there is also a bit of shelf space in there easily usable, give the kids a few of your bug jars. You can also place items on top of any wooden chests, opening them will not displace your items.

If you want to put smaller items on display, there is always bowls, baskets, buckets and kettles you can use, you can put them anywhere you can fit them, fill them up with whatever you want. There was potential in the cellar to get some nice big shelves vacant for displaying larger items like armor, furs, or whatever you wanted to put there. You wanted to leave all the smithing stuff and most of the barrels out of one cellar you build, you could have a storage area in the cellar. You can place small items around the junk in the house. You can even go set the table, leave the junk on the table and put your stuff around it.

It is best to leave out most barrels when furnishing, you get less junk and sacks. Your house likes to reject your decorating attempts if it does not recognise your items, dump them on the floor and either go out the front door, or better into the cellar and return, then start decorating. All the junk in the house respawns if you leave it for 10 days, so taking things off shelves to get more space is not really feasible.

The tall shelves are not bookcases, sorry. 1 per house without the library. You can stack books on the shelves I guess, but they are not a '1 click' deal. The only real bookshelf is located on the upper main hall. Be careful and count the number of books, it's very buggy. You can put 18 books on each shelf. It may say you can put more, and if you do, others disappear. This has been mentioned by quite a few people. I have the same bug....

All wanting to decorate, definitely listen to aussie!!

Check this thread and the picture links within:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1416632-astarsis-hearthfire-decorating-101/page__pid__21733890__st__30#entry21733890

you showld look decoration 101 thread, lots of tips there, many users discuss how they did it, some nice screenshots
most importantly tips 1 = everything in the house respawn after 10 days

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1416632-astarsis-hearthfire-decorating-101/

you can build 3 manors total. the way it's set, you must plan your houses in advance

myself I designed them as follow

LAKEVIEW - THE MAIN ARMORY - also my first house
SIDE BONUS: GIANT FULLY CONNECTED PATIO !!!
-wing: armory - 5 manikins, with closets under them to store weapons and extra armor pieces, nice for sorting armors and weapons
- also got 2 big 5 weapons racks and a bunch of shield racks (good for 2 hand swords)
- also some verry large display cases that can contain multiple weapons or other stu
-wing: storage room
-extra armor storage for overflow categories (vampiric, etc)
-you can always dump stuff on top of chests, it will not fall (I dumped lot of armor pieces in there)
-wing: bedroom

HELJARCHEN = THE MAIN ALCHEMY LABORARTORY
-wing: alchemy tower (doh !)
-wing: greenhouse !
-wing: kitchen

the ultimate house for gardening, cooking and alchemy

WINSTAD - THE ENCHENTING LAB / MUSEUM / LIBRARY
-wing: enchanting tower
-wing: library tower
-wing: trophy room ==== put azura star there

=you can place books anywhere in pile up to 4 high
=the library wing store over 300 books (I think the exact number is 308)
=other manors only got the bedroom bookshelves
=vyndrell hall in marketh also got a verry large well organized library

=trophy room got a lot of space, ecen after you build the displays

Kitchen, Trophy room and storage room do not add any bookshelves. The best bet is to get the Library. The house, without a library only gets one "working" bookshelf. There is a lot of shelf space though to place your books on. You just have to lay them down. I also use some of the display cases for my books.

However, to get more display cases, weapon racks and plagues, armor mannequins, you need to build the Armory. You have 3 plots to build houses on, that means you can build each addition once.

I've build 4 houses so far on 3 different characters, but I have yet to build a Library. That will be next. I love the Kitchen, since you can bake some new food items!

The library might get some negative reviews, but I like it better than having no library at all. It cracks me up to see Torvar in there with a book. Sweetie, you're holding it upside down...

I was hoping they were book shelves. In the wiki, I did not count the ones that did not already come with stuff on them as I know those don't work as book shelves. The library does not even have enough book shelves for me, but I am a ravenous book collector.

LOL after a while you will have a lot of duplicate books though, I found. I decorated the tall shelves that come with the various rooms, but soon gave up, since everything respawns after 10 days. So it's actually moot to take the stuff off and then place books or other things on those shelves. That's the only gripe I have with Hearthfire. Why did the devs think to place clutter on every even surface?

Lots of duplicate books are fine, there is always yet another house that needs books for shelves, fish out some interesting duplicates and leave the main collection in storage. At least till they give us that arcanaeum key and we have somewhere big enough to put the full collection, all nicely sorted. Either that or they are going to have to come up with a better library for us to own. They did give us almost one entire shelving unit to decorate, in the back room of the main hall, they must have forgot to put most of the junk on it.

http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j215/aussie500/Skyrim/books.jpg

I used the shelf to place my insects in a jar. 2 on the top shelf, 2 on the bottom.

Yea, but it's a small shelf. I also started to pile some books on that one. And I agree, some of the Library shelves should have held at least 18 books, not just 11!

I placed my insect jars on the wall shelves in that room, you can easily fit 3 on one wall shelf