The Process of Being Organized, Part 2 Spreading Out

Are you wondering how my organizing is coming? After my declarations in The Process of Being Organized, I began thinking about one of the blogs I follow, Catholic Christian Homeschooling. I may not be catholic, but I do enjoy the things SAHMinIL blogs about. She is very down-to-Earth and a good deal of fun to read :-) Aaaand, she is from the region I grew up in! Definitely... groooovy ;-)

At any rate... to get back on track: She posted a blog a few weeks back called Instant School Room. It contains a video clip from a CBS segment showing how to convert a dining room into an instant office. SAHMinIL made the correlation to using this concept for families who do not have a "classroom" and needed ideas for doing school in their dining room without all the clutter.

I do have a "classroom" but as I have said before, it is in a dark corner of our daylight basement... getting NO daylight! I know... beggars can't be choosers! But we do always end up upstairs. I discussed this situation with my husband and his response made me feel like, 'Well, duh, why didn't I think of that!' He suggested I move math, reading, and language arts upstairs to the dining room and then relegate the other subjects to the rec room and the craft table there-in.

Enter SAHMinIL's blog and video. I could convert a portion of my buffet into storage for our supplies. The buffet....


... now serves two purposes! One side has my serving platters and the other side is housing the needed school supplies :-) No longer will I need to cart these things up and down the stairs for our work (though I could use that exercise!)

I will be using one of the drawers to keep the kids' folders and pencil boxes in.

In all the re-arranging/organizing I have done in the last few days I even cleared the craft table and SCRUBBED it shiny clean (it usually has tons of paint, marker, and tape marks on it!)

... aaand... because I am splitting the work spaces, I moved our paper sorter (which we use as a storage sorting shelf) so that the craft table above has more space to spread out on! Now when we do time lines and large posters, we won't have to maneuver around so much stuff! (This sorter was sitting at the end of the craft table, up against the wall)
I am pleased with the progress. The curriculum is sorted into subject relative boxes and I will begin the process of going through that after the in-laws leave next week. Still more cleaning to be done but at least our HOME(school) is steaming down the track to being in order!

In the mean time... check out Catholic Christian Homeschooling and SAHMinIL's blog, Instant School Room, and be inspired like I was!