I haven't blogged about this on any of my blogs, but for the last few weeks I have been in a major organizing/decluttering mood.  Think "nesting", only for homeschooling, kitchen, and toy space.  What prompted this was the loss of our porch.  It gets too cold in the fall/winter/spring, and we're too cheap to heat it!  So our "3-season porch" is really a 1-season (summer), and when we cloesd it, I lost toy storage and study space. 

So, I've been on a mission.  I posted about it on the Sonlight forums and also did searches for organizational help.  I found many posts with IKEA products in them and so ... of course I had to plan a trip down (2 hours away) to IKEA.  Oh. My. Goodness.  What a store!  I could blog about it for days but let me just say that I was in heaven.

This is what my living room looked like before:

You can't see all of it, but there is a couch on the wall to the right and a loveseat to the left.  By the loveseat was another shelf of books.  The majority of our books were in the living room.  Toys were brought out and sometimes stayed for days, because they lost their play space in the porch.  We did our homeschooling on the kitchen table.  It was hard to do this for a number of reasons - but the big ones were that I always was cleaning something off the table to do the next thing.  Piles of schoolwork were accumulating, or magazines, or mail, or whatever! 

Here are some after pictures:

Here is our new homeschooling area!  We purchased this table from IKEA, called "Norden Gateleg".  It has 3 drawers on one side, and 3 drawers on the other.  This is plently big for the children to work on something on one side and me to work on my studying on the other side!  All of our homeschooling supplies are either in the drawers or they are in the shelf from IKEA, called "Expedit".  I could have purchased a larger one but I didn't want to overwhelm the living room.  I will probably buy another when I can because this wasn't big enough for all of our books!  So my books are upstairs, children's non-homeschooling books are in their room. 

Here is the best part ... when we are done with our schooling and studies ... I can do this:

Now the table doesn't overpower the living room!  We still have our couch and TV on the other side of thel living room but we put the loveseat in the porch for now.  Our living room was just too cluttered before, but now it is much more functional for what we need!  This will make homeschooling so much more streamlined.  I did buy a little table and 2 chairs from IKEA called "Latt" - this will be a great place for Serena to spend time on her "school" while I work with the older ones. 

I have other improvements for our home organization, but I will probably post them on my other blog - since this is my "homeschooling" blog. ;-)

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Posted by redmom

I'm dying to visit an IKEA. Unfortunately, I don't even know where the closest one is. I'm guessing a good 5 or 6 hours away.

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Posted by Jade

Thanks for sharing your pics of
the learning area. It's very inviting.
Have a wonderful week!
Jade

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