You'll remember I posted before about our 2014/2015 School Room Tour, because we'd made, what I considered at the time, to be some pretty nifty changes to our school room.
You're welcome to check the link above to see the original post, but the pics above will give you an idea where I went with organizing the multitude of things needed for our school space.
Well, we've had a few months to test drive the new system and I was pretty happy with it. Functionally, I mean. I was so much more organized than what I'd been working with.
As time went on though, I could see that we needed to tweak it further.
We had some doors in the cubby units, that were brightly coloured, and I thought eye catching.
Turns out it's distracting for kids with attention problems.
So when we had the opportunity to replace our TV unit with a similar one in black, we scooped all the black doors from the front school room, and decided to match the doors to the already white units.
Very white, very boring. Very functional for the distracted monkeys.
The doors were added to more of the units, which allowed us to not see all the books. I think it contributes to a more stream lined look. The white very much brightens the room, which in med-January was a very welcome change.
We did also decide that we had too many paper types, note books, and even colouring books to store them in a way that helped us know in the first place that I already had them.
This resulted in me making more copies than necessary, or spending too much money on buying doubles of things. Big money saver, actually.
So we did a little reorganization, and added some more drawers to the units, rather than just doors.
We have partially re-labelled, but have more of that job left.
The neatest hack in this room, in my opinion, by far, were the tiny shelves that my dear husband added to the insides of the cubes. They hold the multitude of paper types, and small things, and do a great job of allowing us to see at a glance when we happen to be out of any given thing.
I am finding that I am breathing a sigh of relief. Things are easier to find, and less over whelming visually.
Nony of A Slob Comes Clean, is a favourite blogger of mine when it comes to de-cluttering. She's great at talking about it all, and hilarious to boot. She talks on many occasions about the container method. How you can only have what fits in the container. These units we've put in the school room really work well with that concept, and I have to make what I have fit, or get rid of it, to keep the stuff behind the doors, which makes the whole room look better. Keeps me honest about my pack rat ways. Keeps me motivated, because I really like it when it's tidy, even if tidy seems a little out of reach with five children, who are onsite most of the time.
We did keep the coloured cubbies in one of the units, because those were the kids' personal 'locker' type storage space. They had become accustomed to the colours they each had, so they stay.
They may grow out of them soon, they may not. In the mean time, I have my splash of colour.
One last thing that we did was repaint and shellac the chairs in a darker colour. They used to be a honey colour and drove me a little crazy. This works better in the room, and is a little more forgiving than the light colour.
I would definitely say that the colour change in this room makes all the difference in the world.
Now to dig out the label maker and move on to making sure *everyone else* can find all the stuff and things.
