You may remember that I mentioned a while back that we are making a school room in what was formerly our dining room. Well, we finally have made some significant progress AND I managed to take some pictures! Hey, that adds up to a LOT of progress. :)
Years ago, we were truly blessed when my grandparents down-sized their home and needed to get rid of their dining room furniture. We were the fortunate recipients of their large dining room table, chairs, china cabinet, and buffet. And we sure do appreciate all these years that we've been able to have a wonderful room full of furniture when so many young families have empty dining rooms! Thank you, Grandmother!
We've never been a very formal family, so I can't say that the dining room table has ever gotten a lot of use as an eating place. And we don't use our lovely formal china a lot either.
Since we started homeschooling, the dining room table turned into a catch-all place for papers, books, puzzles, and other things. And the dining room became a pet bedroom for Lucy, Theodore, and Amos. :) Even though Craig suggested it a while back, it took me a while to come around to the realization that it really suits our family better for the dining room to be a school room.
I was inspired when The Pioneer Woman's guest blogger, OMSH, posted pictures of her homeschool room. After that, I was on a hunt for all pictures I could find for inspiration and ideas. One great resource was the Not Back-to-School Blog Hop School Room Week hosted by Life With My 3 Boybarians. After looking through over 100 homeschool rooms, I had lots of great ideas and we were ready to get started!
We're still working on things. But since that may go on for a while, knowing our pattern with big projects such as this, I thought I'd go ahead and post some pictures.
You may notice that the guinea pigs got to remain but Lucy moved out. She is currently right next door in the den/foyer area but her permanent residence is still up for debate. Her giant bed doesn't fit there very well so she'll either have to get a new bed or move to a different location.
The kids were very instrumental in choosing the counter-height table. I wanted one that was a regular height because the distance between the seats and tabletop seemed shorter (and therefore better for doing schoolwork). But the kids were insistent. They love this table and want to sit there to do everything.
The piano is still in the room which works out well since we schedule piano practice into our school days. I'm planning to frame all sorts of artwork that the kids have done and hang it over the piano and probably over the guineas, too. I want it to be in a random arrangement and in different shapes and styles of frames rather than really orderly. A good example of what I have in mind is the art wall that the Hillman Family has at The Very Flowers That Bend and Meet.
This fabulous shelf is an Expedit shelf from IKEA. I love, love, love it! It may look full but it really still has tons of space left right now. I still have some organizing to do with it. And we need some more of those wonderful green magazine files (also IKEA). The lights on top are also from IKEA and are really just to provide some extra light in the room rather than to spotlight the shelves.
The shelf holds all of our current materials and things we use regularly. Plus lots of games, math manipulatives, extra workbooks, teacher's manuals, and catalogs. We still have our homeschool closet downstairs that houses books waiting to be read (Sonlight cores) and used curriculum. To say that homeschooling produces lots of "stuff" would be quite an understatement!
If I had to choose one thing as my favorite, it might be the rug. I looked long and hard for the perfect rug to go under the table. I forced Craig and both my parents to view rug after rug after rug on Overstock.com, Target.com, Crate and Barrel, and every other website you can imagine as well as dragging Craig out to lots of local stores to look at rugs. We probably looked at close to 100 in person. And I literally looked at thousands online. I wanted something that was colorful and kind of playful. But I didn't want it to be wild. And since this is in a very visible part of our house, it couldn't be so colorful that it was obnoxious. And the size turned out to be another issue...most rugs were too big or too small. I finally decided it was going to have to be round.
I think this rug turned out to be just right. It is colorful but the colors are subdued enough that they don't screech at you when you come through the front door. The stripes are fun and have a bit of pattern. And the roundness of the rug softens all the hard lines in the room. The only thing not just right about it is that it wasn't cheap enough. :)
Just to the left of the shelves we put a small desk for the laptop with two stools. The desk is really a cafe table but it is just the perfect size for the laptop, a book or paper, and a small lamp. The kids love the padded stools!
The ledges above the desk currently have books about fall and Thanksgiving displayed on them. I guess we'll switch to Christmas and winter books in December. I don't know if we'll always use these ledges like this for books but they work well for that right now and the books make a colorful display.
This short wall was once mostly concealed behind a door to the kitchen. Since we always kept the door open (really, I'm not sure we *ever* shut it), we decided to remove the door and make it into a cased opening so that we could have more usable wall space. Of course, we still have to fill in the hinge holes, remove the molding, and repaint, but we'll get around to that one day.
The wall has another book ledge at the top. Right under that is a magnetic knife holder from IKEA for scissors. (I think that is the kids' favorite thing in the room!) Underneath the scissors, we have two kitchen rails with plastic cups hanging on them. The cups are filled with all manner of useful stuff such as pencils, markers, crayons, multiple sizes of popsicle sticks, and googly eyes. These are terrific because they can easily be carried over to the table whenever crayons (or googly eyes) are needed.
Two things in this picture are important:
1) the light...we removed our fancy chandelier to replace it with something more school room appropriate. Because I had a certain image stuck in my head of what a school room should have in it, this is the 3rd light fixture we tried. And honestly, the one I really wanted all along. Ha! It's from Pottery Barn and is "adjustable", meaning that it can be raised and lowered to make the light closer or further from the table. Of course, my idea of adjustable and Pottery Barn's idea of adjustable are not the same. It will be staying put at this distance from the table all the time. And it could stand to be brighter but we couldn't get that without going with a multiple bulb fixture which I didn't want to do. Also, any time we put a brighter bulb into it (which we can do), I am blinded whenever I look up at it. Downsides of being short, I guess.
2) the walls above the doorways...I have been planning to use this space to put an inspirational quote. My plan has been to get vinyl letters from a place such as Wall Words to wrap around the corner above the doors. I've been gathering ideas for quotes. When I mentioned it to Craig, he told me about a local school whose media center has inspirational quotes around the top of the entire room. His thinking is to use multiple quotes and do them around the room. I'm not sure which way to go now. For one thing, doing multiple quotes would get expensive. Also, I wasn't sure if they would all be the same font/color or if maybe they would be the same color but each quote in a different font.
What do you think? What would look best? And while you're commenting, tell me what you think about painting the wall the shelves are on...maybe the same green as the kitchen? Or another color? Thanks!
We're really enjoying our new school room. The kids and I spend a lot of time in there during the day. And Craig has even commented that he thinks it may be his favorite room in the house now! It is very pleasant and cheerful. What more could be better in a room for learning?
