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I consider myself extremely fortunate in many aspects of my life. Just one small example is being lucky enough to have a dedicated space for our homeschool; we’re “officially” known as Dragon Flight Academy (the more I write, the more that will make perfect sense!). This space didn’t happen overnight. It has grown and evolved over several years. I’ve gone through many iterations of storage and organization systems, failed ideas, and way too much wasted money! In the end, we have finally landed in a place which we’ve grown to love and enjoy spending our days.
Martha Would Be Disappointed
I have never and will never claim to live a Pinterest worthy life. Nothing about our surroundings comes even close to Martha Stewart standards! But you know what? I’m OK with it. Life is filled with way too many obstacles for me to be obsessed with attaining the unattainable. I choose function over formality any day. My car is messy. My house is messy. Heck, I’M usually messy! So the point to me writing this it to reach all the other messy moms out there; to show you that not everything has to be picture-perfect to be functional. We are constantly bombarded by images of everyone else’s perfect lives and, frankly, it gets depressing. For me anyway. I don’t think that’s an accurate portrayal of real life. So I’m going to show you what real looks like and some of the things that have worked best for us.
A Little Organization Goes A Long Way
Even if you don’t have a dedicated room for your school, you can still make a space that is unique and functional. We didn’t always have a whole room to call our own. So I got creative. We had a spare closet so I converted it into storage space for all things school-related.
See what I mean about not Pinterest worthy? 😂 But by using a little creativity, I was able to fully utilize an unused space for maximum capacity. I took out the hanging bar, installed a fantastic shelving system that I could customize to my dimensions, covered the shelves with liners that I cut so nothing fell through, and found some affordable storage bins to help organize everything (it is organized, even if it doesn’t look it!).
The turquoise crates are used to keep all of my school records; samples of work and grades from each year. They are made to hold hanging file folders that I’ve labeled by year and stack neatly. I only have to get them down once a year so they stay tucked neatly on the top shelf out of the way. I also labeled the front of each one so I don’t have to search for the current year.
One of the absolute best pieces of advice I can offer for setting up a school area…. storage containers. Bins, boxes, baskets, buckets; whatever you choose will be worth its weight in gold! I’ve also tried a number of these, but I have two that are my favorites.
A desk was something of a challenge for me. Again, functionality is my number one goal. After an extensive search for the right desk to fit our needs and space, I decided to make my own, with a little help of course. I bought two pieces of wood, one long and one shorter, stained them, and mounted them to the wall (that’s where the real help came in!).
I also bought two sets of drawers and used those as the end supports or the legs of the desk. With a little ingenuity, some elbow grease, and about $130 we had a perfect solution.
This is really the spine of our room. I have a rather handy husband, so we have added some custom bookshelves and a storage/window bench.
As we’ve grown, the closet has become storage for project supplies, games, and in-progress works of art. Everything can be stashed away but doesn’t need to be completely dismantled. We mainly use the bookshelves for curriculum and supplemental materials. I use the same stacking baskets and daily work bins to keep some organization here, too.
Our school room fits our needs; it won’t perfectly fit yours. But, I hope that you can take some of the lessons we’ve learned and use our ideas to create your own space.
