how big is your house?

[mommyoftwinboys]

We just moved about 7 months ago and downsized but didn't know at the time we would be homeschooling. Well..now we are and I'm lost how to set everything up! I don't want to be selfish but I don't want our small home to look like a classroom. I do enjoy decorating and making things look nice.
How did you set up? We would need to use our formal dining room for a classroom(we have a small eat in area in the kitchen as well)
Any ideas?
Pictures?

[Cassiopeia]

Keeping the books and art supplies under control are my biggest issues (even in a 1600sq ft. house) If you have the money some nice bookshelves that would be a great investment, I think. If they looked good enough maybe you wouldn't mind them in the dining room? (not a decorator, so that may be a huge faux pas. I don't know!)

[Jojo F.]

We live in a small house with my IL's and decided to homeschool this coming school year.

There is this odd little room off the kitchen that could be considered a pantry. It's large enough for me to set up a table and chairs- child size-, my hutch, and some other odd items- a large plotter for architects that DH is going to take apart if it kills me!!!!!! It is now our "classroom". I'd post a picture if it was clean, maybe that will be a good goal for today since it's raining

I'm interested to see other set ups!!

[cottonwood]

Storage, storage, storage. And yes, be creative in what could be considered a work space. We do often use the dining room table for our projects, and eat in the living room. But we have a few other spaces carved out for projects, one in a bedroom, and one in this weird walk-way type of space we have. Oh, and our house is about 1500 s.f. but that's for a family of six.

[lakesuperiormom]

our schoolroom is in our basement in a room that was designated as a media room.....i have pic's in our blog,but we've changed it and made it more waldorfy and set our playstands up in there. we do most of our schooling in our living room though! lol we use these http://www.mercurius-usa.com/shop,cp...98,poster.html to decorate and have the maps that are the "classic" style to make it look nicer. in our dining room we have a big bookcase hutch that i bought from pier one that also houses a bunch of my stuff for planning and teaching. in our old house we used our dresser with mirror attached in the dining room to house items and it looked awesome....my dh couldn't get past the dresser in the dining room though! it's just not okay to have that there! oh well! choosing items that are schooley yet beautiful has been a big goal for me so as not to look to much like a school....does that make sense?

[MPsSweetie]

Our house is 1280 sq ft. We have tons of closets and cupboards thank goodness, but I still have a hard time organizing. That has been my goal for this summer, to get it all together. We have a desk in Amethysts room, that is of course always covered with junk, so we don't use that. We usually end up at the kitchen table to do any type of crafts or desk work. I also emptied out a bottom cupboard in our hallway that I am going to use for ALL of our homeschooling supplies. Paper, books, etc... I am so excited to work on it!

[pamama]

We live in a small 1300 sq. ft. house(I think that's how big it is). We have a very small living room, a very small dining room, a small family room, a teeny kitchen that opens to the family room, a little mudroom, 1 cramped little office room piled with stuff, 3 teeny bedrooms (2 have sloped roofs and are very narrow attic rooms), and 1 teenytiny bathroom. And 3 kids and 1 big husky! LOL! We use the dining room for any lessons that need a table, and the big comfy squishy chairs in the living room for reading. Our kitchen does not have room for a table or island for eating. We used to have a kitchen table in the mudroom. It was a really tight fit (and who wats to eat with the coats and shoes?) and I wanted a place for my sewing machine so it isn't there anymore. Since we do lessons in the dining room I have to make sure it's all cleared away for meals (or at least pushed to one side, lol). Our dining room really is too small, though. We have a big table with 6 chairs, a corner cupboard, sideboard, endtable, small kiddie table with chairs in the corner and it's where we put all the big toys (toy kitchen, dress ups, toy vacuum, toy stroller, etc). I keep the books we are currently using arranged as neatly as possible on the side board. We keep a big plastic tub with all the arts and crafts stuff under the dining room table. I do have some school things and artwork taped to the walls of the dining room, but we tend to tape that kinda stuff all over the house, wherever the kids want it displayed. All the rest of the books we use for school are on a big bookshelf in the living room. We have 2 big shelves in the living room, I use one for our homeschool books, past and future, but it is quickly filling up and we're not sure what to do when it's full yet.
We also have a small attic and unfinished basement so we may start storing things we don't need right away in labeled tubs in the basement. We are pretty cramped in this house and could use a bigger place but can't afford one right now.
So far our arrangement in the dining room is working pretty well, but I will admit I'm a lousy decorator (we're still using the ugly curtains that came withthe house, lol) so as long as things are picked up, clean and reasonably organized i'm happy.

(Oh, and right now my house is a disaster. I kept gettinng more and more behind in housework with a difficult pg ad new baby and we're just now starting to get caught up.)

[Dakota's Mom]

Our house is really tiny. We have a living room, two bedrooms and dining room bathroom and a large closet they call a kitchen. We use the dining room for everything. My sewing is at one end of the table. There is a set of shelves on that side of the table for sewing supplies and such. My computer is on the other side of the table. I put a shelf above my computer desk for school stuff. We do school work at the table. My husband and son build rockets at the table. We eat at the table. Everything happens in the dining room. It's a mess all the time.

Yesterday I cleared off the table. It's amazing to see that there really is space there. I still have a sewing machine setting on a corner, but you can actually see the top of the rest of it. It looks so different.

Kathi

[moominmamma]

We are similar to fourlittlebirds with about 1500 sq.ft. for six of us. Intelligent storage is definitely what's needed. We don't have it. Relentless decluttering helps too, but we all have packrat tendencies ... and with no library we've found it necessary to accumulate huge numbers of books. We certainly have our challenges!

Miranda

[ABand3]

I haven't tried this, but have heard of people using plastic rolling bins (like this)under the dining room table as hs storage - pull them out when you're working on hs stuff, push them under when you want the dr to be a dr, with a tablecloth you wouldnt be able to see them much at all.

My house is big, but we're still messy and disorganized when it comes to storing and using hs and craft supplies.

[moonshoes]

Our house is 1200 square feet, plus about 400 square feet of almost-finished basement.

Right now the kids enjoy sharing a bedroom, so we use the third bedroom as a classroom. I don't know how much longer this will work, as DD is increasingly wanting her own "space" (although she's not ready to sleep alone at night.) I'm thinking maybe we can get one more year out of this arrangement. Hopefully be then we will be in a new house. I hope.

If not, we will use the downstairs somehow and re-arrange it. If I had a dining room AND an eat-in kitchen I would definitely use the dining room as a classroom.

[onlyzombiecat]

Our house is large enough I guess.
We do stuff all over (outside sometimes too) so there isn't a classroom feel. We work in the living room at the coffee table often. Sometimes we use the dining table.

I have a shelf unit with all the books and some supplies in a small area just off the living room. The shelf fits behind the bathroom door so if the bathroom door is open you don't see it at all. I hung up some corkboard above it to hang up pictures or maps in one spot.
I have some stuff like extra paper put away in desk drawers at our computer desk.

If you don't want to see stuff all the time you could put it in a cabinet with doors or a storage box that you put away at the end of each day. In my living room I have an inexpensive corner table with stuff stored under it and a tablecloth covering it all. You would not know that there are ugly weights stored under there. I have a plant on the table.

At our previous house, I had a shelf unit behind the couch to store homeschool stuff. It was about the same height so wasn't super obvious. Dd also kept toys back there.

Maybe you could use your kitchen area for storing homeschool supplies.

[AngelBee]

We live in 1 room with a walk in closet. We have access to bathroom and kitchen but that is shared space.

We put wall length shelves up to store any supplies.

[caitlinsmom]

We live in a 1100 sqft house and have only 2 bedrooms, so not really any extra space for anything. Dh and I came up with a design for a built in office area in our dining room. Here is a pic (scroll mid of page). http://naturallysimple.blogspot.com/...ramblings.html we also added a small filing cabinet. I have file folders that I store everything in. In the bottom drawer I store extra supples and I also have a few baskets on the upper shelves that store extras. Other than that I keep everything on the shelves on the left side. I keep it simple and use the library as much as possible so that i can return the books and not worry about storing them!

[Diane~KJ]

Storage is key, especially if you don't want your house to look like a school room. I've seen some pictures of converting an armoire into holding most of your supplies behind closed doors, seems like the neatest and easiest solution. If I find the link, I'll come back and post it, but you could also find some ideas by doing a google seach on the subject.
good luck,
Di

[Stinkerbell]

I keep alot of our "school" stuff in a microwave cart I recycled and a small armoire with doors. Books, reference, craft materials, ongoing projects, etc.

My house is 2300 SF and the truth is that is TOO MUCH HOUSE.

[vicnoe]

We've got about 2300 square feet, but it's broken up in an odd design and we don't have one room just for homeschooling. I store supplies on a bookshelf in the computer area and I have an organizer cart I purchased from Lowes (it has 5 pull out drawers with Monday - Friday stenciled on the front) where Elle keeps her current work for the week.

We work on the dining room table or at the island in the kitchen. Sometimes she works on a lap desk in her room. Dh purchased a piece of plywood to sit on top of my son's train table so that it can double as a work space. The problem I'm having is that, due to the strange layout of the floor plan, our supplies are in one part of the house and our work area is in another. It seems much more disorganized to have it set up this way. I'm hoping we can finish part of the basement so that we can have a separate area for schooling.

[KathleenSLP]

Originally Posted by lakesuperiormom

we use these http://www.mercurius-usa.com/shop,cp...98,poster.html to decorate

LSM, how big are those posters? I can't find dimensions on the site. They are beautiful.

[elizawill]

we have a 4 bedrooms/2bath home and it's 2200 sq ft. our 4th bedroom is my husband's office right now (and where my computer is too), but this set-up will hopefully change in the next year or two - i plan to make it our "school room" when dh gets an office in charlotte. right now we do "school" in the kitchen or in the kid's play tent on our porch. i store stuff on a big shelf in our laundry room. next year, i may create a school space, but like the OP i don't want "school" in the kid's bedroom. i tried that already and have redecorated it already..... it just was too modge podge for me and we hated it.

[kittywitty]

Tiny ~700 sq. ft. we have no room for everything, so our living room is basically like an unorganized library!