My Homeschooling Place

[Note: this paragraph is a tangent, and is quite skip-able. Skip to the 2nd paragraph for the actual content for today's post. The paragraph is staying because I like rambling and this is my blog so I can ramble here to my heart's conent. =P] I'm back after a short break. My mom was visiting some last week, and we were busy sorting and cleaning out stuff, so that's where last Wednesday's and last Friday's posts went. You didn't miss much. I haven't made a lot of progress on anything art-wise lately. XD I've been on a big purge-all-the-things and an organize-all-the-other-things kick. Ostensibly by simplifying things I am hoping to make it so I can have more time overall to work on art projects. Right now, I feel like I spend way too much time trying to keep up with basic chores around this house. Okay, so realistically, it will never be that clean considering six people and four cats live here, but my goal, right now, is to streamline things so that a reasonable state of cleanness can be achieved with less time and effort. So, I'm reorganizing things so that everything has a place (this is the organizing part). If I cannot find a place for something, I am getting rid of it (this is the purging part)--you can imagine after 13.5 years of marriage, my husband and I have collected quite a bit of stuff, not to mention the 20.5 years of stuff before getting married. XD There are a few things I can't find places for now that I really really want to keep--a lot of my books are falling into this category right now--and those things are getting boxed up, labeled, and put in a special place in the garage for the time being. My books will come out eventually, but for now it will just have to wait. I plan on converting my oldest's bedroom into a library as soon as he leaves for college (<5 years away now); I'll put a fold out couch or something in there for when he comes home to visit. He's okay with this since he's actually more bookish than I am. =P

Anyways, back on topic. I spent a lot of last week working on the reorganizing/purging project since we had the week off from school. The focus was mostly the room I use for homeschooling stuff, and sorting clothing since my boys seemed to be having trouble figuring out what was theirs and what was their brothers--given all of them have very small waists and no butt to speak of even the 12 year old can fit into the 6 year old's shorts. The school area is a big focus for me because it's one of those places that gets a lot of use and gets really messy really quickly, and I spend a lot of time cleaning it up. I got new shelves for the school area last week that suit the area much better than the shelves I had there before. The old shelves have been sent up to my oldest's bedroom (step one to making his room into a library and in the mean time I'll let him store his books on it =P). I'm not 100% finished getting everything back on the shelves. I did manage to throw out 2 giant trash bags worth of stuff and box up 2 large plastic buckets worth of books we probably don't need out right now. The idea is that if there's less stuff, there's less to pick up, and if everything has a clear place, it's easier for the kids to help pick things up in the afternoon. A couple of weeks ago, I also invested in a drop leaf table. I put fuzzy felt things on the bottom of the table legs so I can move it easily. This way the kids have a place to work at, but when we aren't doing school, I can fold the table up and slide it out of the way.

So, here's some pictures of the progress on the school area. There area still some things I'd like to do, although it's starting to get into the cosmetic changes as opposed to practical changes. For instance, I want to recover the red chair, and I'd also like to paint the bottom half of the room (you'll note there is a random piece of molding going across the middle of the wall--that came with the house, and I'm disinclined to go through the effort of removing it).

 The chair I want to recover. It's a 3rd generation hand-me-down and is super comfy; it's just not my color. This corner probably needs the most work, but mostly just in straitening things up. After a couple of weeks of use the book boxes there on the left get kind of messy.

 The new shelves...

 The kids' computer area plus the drop-leaf table stored away.

The drop-leaf table when it's pulled out.