Thursday, March 29, 2012

Spring Cleaning, Part 1 School space clutter

I've been bitten by the spring cleaning bug!   Actually, for me it's more of a spring ORGANIZING bug.  I rearranged my living/school area.


Before :
I had problems to solve: No home for the backpacks, school items in separate areas of the house, no boxes for Mark, office supplies spread out, bulletin board too hard to see or get to, and no space to get around the table easily.

I had also decided that I need to SEE where things are easily, so I placed the other 2 bookshelves within view of the workspace.  I also reorganized the small kidlet supplies and activities into boxes. 

After:

See the pink backpack box?   LOVE this.  Our home is old, and has no coatcloset, and the coat hooks in the narrow entryway are FULL.  We co-op once a week, and love to dash out the door with books sometimes, so backpacks are a necessity for us.

Sterilite boxes are great!  I like to organize my activities with lots of bits in those.  I had done Activities in a Bag, and I really like to concept, but was getting irritated by the ziplock bags in plain sight.  So, I tried shoebox size boxes from Walmart.   That worked really well for the few sets I tried, so I went back to get more.   It turns out that you need to BUY MORE than you need right now,  since if you like the boxes, finding the same boxes later is almost impossible, they change the lines far too frequently. 


I also was able to finish getting my workboxes up.   It's too expensive to buy these all at once, so I've been doing it slowly, over several months.   The drawers hold 12x12 x3 items, so almost all their schoolwork goes right in. On days that I know will be rough, like Mondays, I like to prefill the boxes and just let the kids go for it, so I don't have so many questions or arguments to deal with.
I have my printer, laminator, and their accessories here as well.  


While doing all this I discovered that great way to keep a board from falling down behind the shelves is to put something behind it, like a chunk of marble.. or a brick.  Yes, it took me years to realize this... :-P