School Room

I wasn't going to participate in this week's blog hop theme because it's not good for me to look at pictures of everyone else's fun rooms. It causes me to covet all over the place. (I will peek around, though.) However, I thought I would post these because I had several friends ask to see what we purchased on our 9 hour (yes, 9 hour!) Ikea shopping trip. There are a few things in this area that are new.

When we built our house, we had a room designated as the school room. It didn't turn into everything I wanted it to be because it was small with very little wall space due to a large window, a large closet, and pocket doors. And now the only wall left is taken up by the piano.

I'm also very fickle, so I decided to turn that space into the toyroom and designate the former toy "area" as the school area. This makes better since because I can continue to make lunch or whatever and answer the kids' questions while they're doing schoolwork.

This is the "breakfast nook" area, located at the end of the kitchen. I love the inexpensive table top and legs mix and match choices at Ikea. We were torn between the fake wood top or the stainless steel top. We knew the wood top would eventually get scratched up, but we knew the stainless steel would attract fingerprints galore. It really does, so I have to clean it a lot. But it's pretty and matches our home well. The chairs were very inexpensive, also ($9 each, I think), but I like them because they're folding in case we need to store them. And they also match our white Ikea highchair and tall standing booster chair.

I bought the utensil holder with a turnstyle base at Hobby Lobby with a 40% off coupon, and the rug was very inexpensive from Wal-Mart.

I also found a coupon for the workbox system (3 separate organizers) at Office Depot. I also loved the neutral color of these since they are right in our living room. My tall shelf is from Hobby Lobby and perfect for all of my binders (idea binders and the kids' subject binders) and file boxes, which contain (at the moment) the kids' coloring books, activity books, and magazines. There's a little plant stand that is empty so that we can set the table organizer on it when they need the extra table space.

This wardrobe with sliding doors is GREAT. We have a similar one in our bedroom and the boy's bedroom. It holds so much. My OCD loves having everything neatly behind closed doors, as well. The only thing I would have done differently: the black glass doors are so pretty and look nice, but they show fingerprints and dust. That's not the case for the dark wood paneled one in our bedroom and the white glass doors in the boys' room.

This is one side at the moment. My plan is to keep holiday stuff in the sliding tubs at top. I also have some tools that are too sharp for the kids up there, as well as packs of construction paper (because if I didn't, my son would go through a pack a day).

And this is the other side. I still have some organizing to do at the bottom. I had to switch everything around to put some of the craft supplies out of the kids' reach. In my ideal romantic world, supplies would be in their reach so that they could readily express their creativity at any moment. Eh. The constant messes got really old. We're working on teaching our kids to put things away. Apparently, I did an incomplete job of this when they were younger. It's really, really hard to keep a clean house these days.