Please Re-Lease Me…

Posted by Julie | 0 comments

I have a happy place.

….In my head.

You should see it.

The walls are painted a soft buttery yellow. There are light wood cabinets with generous counter tops. Several rolls of butcher paper are anchored conveniently adjacent to a low work table stocked with crayons, markers and other art supplies. There are framed pieces of my children’s artwork cleverly displayed. In the center of the room is a large square table with bright rolling chairs pulled up to individual work stations. My children’s well-groomed heads are bent over their lessons, stacks of learning materials well-organized and within reach. And over in that corner, under a generous window, is my desk, the bright sunlight spilling over the coordinated lesson plan notebook open to today’s date with a fashionable pen resting at the ready.

Now, take a great big straight pen.

And POP that homeschool fantasy balloon.

‘Cuz that just ain’t the way it is right now, folks.

We’ve just signed yet another lease on the house we are currently occupying as we enter the twenty-third month of our previous home sitting on the real estate market 220 miles away. That house sitting 220 miles away was practically custom-built for our large family homeschooling needs, complete with a great school room and plenty of storage. The previous two homes we have owned, one tiny and the other mid-size, we were also able to custom-carve room for a school room that met the needs of our style of schooling.

But sandwiched in between our times of in-residence home ownership (as opposed to our current season of off-site home ownership…) have been a spate of leased residences that were not constructed with a big, DIY schooling family in mind. I’ve had to adjust schooling to an unfurnished tiny apartment, an island bachelor-pad style house and our current leasing situation which is a thousand square feet smaller than our home that is still sitting on the market. And while I still have hopes that my happy place homeschool fantasy will one day become a reality, I have picked up a few adjustments along the real estate way that have brought a little bit of ease to our temporary classrooms.

So how to make the most of tight quarters when it comes to all the flotsam and jetsam that seems to trail a homeschool path?

First, take inventory. For real. Get out all the stuff that is the material of your homeschooling. The notebooks, text books, computer software, games, flash cards, art supplies, markers, paints, backpacks, teacher manuals, enormous 3-ring binders and your archives, where you store the work your children have completed. Get realistic about just how big that pile is. In my homes that have had ample storage, it was easy for me to underestimate just how much space was going to need to be dedicated to our classroom supplies. When I had to take a hard look at just how many alphabet puzzles we actually owned and how much shelf space those puzzles required, I knew I was going to have to be more selective.

Second, decide what space is going to be dedicated to your supplies…and cull accordingly. I know that can be a bit painful. I know it can even seem a bit counter-intuitive to good stewardship. But I wax philosophic from a life-changing tidbit I took from Steve and Teri Maxwell’s book Managers of Their Homes. Their book focuses primarily on scheduling, but I have found application of a central guiding principal from their book that transcends time management.

Teri writes that:

God created 24 hour days, and if you find yourself with 27 hours of activities listed for a 24 hour day, then you clearly have 3 hours worth of activities that God didn’t intend for you to have in your day, or else He would have created 27 hour days for you.

The same has held true for my up-and-down sizing over the last five years. In House A, I have room for four shelves to be dedicated to a Native American unit study, complete with a set of tom-toms and a full-size teepee. But now the Lord is taking me to House B. And House B has room to store a week’s worth of toilet paper and a few art supplies. So, apparently, my full-out unit study materials may need to go bless someone else. As the Lord guides, my House A homeschool collection is not intended for my House B storage.

Third, rethink your rooms. We are presently schooling in what is supposed to be the formal dining room. Now, this may seem an obvious place to stick the schooling stuff for a lot of folks; for them, the formal dining room is the spot that only sees action on a couple of holidays throughout the year. But for us, we really need that formal dining room to function as, well, a formal dining room. My husband’s career requires that we host formal dinner parties and social events. And even though our present living situation is tight, we still need to throw those kinds of soirees. However, I found that I could house homeschool supplies in a buffet. I reconfigured some shelving with cabinet-style doors to hide workbooks. The display areas of these furniture pieces hold decorative platters and pretty candles; the concealed portions hide our creative messes.

The kitchen eating area in this house is tiny, tiny, tiny. We could work at the kitchen table, but there is no room in that area for storage. So to the dining room we go. Perhaps for you it could be a small table and shelf unit placed in the back corner of the family room. Maybe there’s a landing at the top of the stairs that could provide your schooling spot. In one of our houses, the master closet was enormous, even though the bedroom was small. That master closet served as office, nursery and schooling nook at various times in our resdiency there. In other words, think outside of the box.

You probably have your homeschooling happy place, just like I do. Whether you are leasing, renting, homesteading, building or paying that mortgage every month, very few of us have the ultimate homeschool set-up. But with a few adjustments, that organizational and storage challenge of bringing the education home can be managed. Take stock, cull accordingly and think outside the four-wall box.

And don’t forget to leave room for a cup of coffee. A really big cup of coffee.

Julie Carr, aka Octamom, has been steering her homeschool ship while falling behind in laundry for over 12 years now. A mother of eight children ranging in ages from 18 years old to 20 month-old twins, Julie enjoys a slightly obssessive relationship with photography and writing. Be sure to follow her blog at Octamom.