I like to organize. I really do. I love the feeling it gives me when things are in their place. Besides, with as many bodies as we have in this house ( and the fingers that come with said bodies!), organization is a must! I enjoy thinking about how to make a certain area run more smoothly. I think about what I want the area to look like or what I want the end result to be, and I work from there. It seems quite strange I suppose, I but enjoy the whole process of getting from where we are now to where I wants us to be so very much!
It’s not only the laundry, shoes, books, toys, etc. that need to be kept tidy and organized, it’s our school too. Not many people have to deal with this, for not many people home school. We don’t have a set school room, so we “do” school in the dinning room. But that’s not a separate room, either. We have an open concept kind-of house where the living room, dinning room, kitchen, and wash room (utility room, laundry room, or whatever you call the room where your utility sink and washer/dryer is) are all connected with no doors.
The dinning room table is where most school work is done, with an occasional trip to a bedroom if quite is really needed that day. I would love to have desks, but that’s not a reality right now.
I did have all the school books (both mine and the students) on the books shelf, which is in our living room. It worked for a time, but little fingers kept getting into things (imagine that!) and there really was no adequate space for their notebooks, binders and the like. I also had a three drawers system where I kept craft supplies: construction paper, glue guns, glitters, and so on (you can see it at the left of the picture). This was constantly gotten into, as well.
I was thinking of what to do with my dilemma of keeping things close enough at hand for when they are needed, yet not so close as to cause trouble. At the same time, I was re-painting my kitchen cabinets and subsequently, I was cleaning things out and re-organizing them. That’s when it hit me: use some of the cabinet space for school supplies/books/craft items. Brilliant!!
No, those are not streaks on a dirty cabinet. I painted them that way on purpose and I’m not happy with how it turned out. 
There are cupboards by the bathroom that were not really being used very well. There were vases and candles sticks on the top shelf, gluten free items on the second (I can eat gluten again, so those items weren’t being used much, if at all), and a messy array of spice containers, extracts, various items in bags, etc. on the bottom shelf.
This is where it gets a bit…. confusing. I needed someplace to go with all this stuff and the pantry was the first logical place. But that needed some re-organizing as well. To do that, I needed to have a place for the plethora of mason jars and glass bottles we have. This organizing led to putting all the mason jars and glass bottles into the (non used, not hooked up) dishwasher for storage. This freed up the space I needed for the gluten free items, but I still needed room for the rest of the stuff. That led to organizing the pantry. While cleaning that out and putting things away in their new home, something else caught my eye. We have a large counter/island that has open shelving in it. I’ve gotten quite tired of the food splashes, the greasy shelves, and the bowls/dishes needing a good rinsing before using. So I decided to put a curtain in front of it. But to do so, I needed to clean off the shelves, which led to organizing them. This was a good time to do so, for I might as well organize everything so nothing is floating around, waiting for a home. Of course, I could have picked a better time to do all this and not at 8 pm, but some times things happen like this…. and so brain works!
before after
Everything has a good home now and I have a free cupboard! (Plus, places got cleaned out and up that haven’t seen the sight of a wash rag in… well, for some time). I moved all of our school items into the cupboard and found that I had extra room for our craft supplies. I was quite thrilled with this, for I had no other place to put them! This also allowed me to use the drawers in another organizing escapade I had in this post (they are the plastic drawers holding my scraps).
The top shelf now holds my books, paints, rulers, and pompoms.
The second shelf holds the binders, notebooks, colored pencils jar, crayon jar, pencil jar, eraser jar, and the tote full of craft stuff.
And the bottom shelf holds their Bibles, glue and the “goodie” container. The little shelf in this section of the cupboard holds the hot glue sticks, hole punch, and various little items.
Now everything is tidy, well with-in reach, yet not with-in reach to the fingers that have no business touching them. Each school aged child has their own color binder and I’ve decided that there will be no set pencils or erasers. The jar of said items will be put on them table in the morning and when school is done, the pencils/erasers go back in their jar. No fighting. No losing stuff. No Mama upset.
I have also purchased little “goodie” items for school time. The idea is that when a child is doing well with their school, ie. not playing around, not being distracted, being quiet, etc, I can choose to let them pick out a goodie. I have never required that the younger ones sit at the table during school time, but I will from now on. It just gets to be too much with them wandering around and such.
We start school on Monday. Maacah will be in 5th grade, Grace is in 4th, Isaac is in 3rd, and Malachi will be in 1st. Nathaniel and Damaris will be hanging out, learning colors, numbers, letters, and the like.
I sure hope this works!