When we were blessed with the new schoolroom, we were also blessed with an amazing storage space. Problem-it was FULL of junk. It has been cleaned out bit by bit over the past year, but it was finally at the point to just take a few days and finish it. That’s just what I did last week!
Here’s a few way-before shots to give you an idea of what has been accomplished over the last 10 months. Originally it looked like this, filled wall to wall, floor to ceiling with stuff. Most of it not even belonging to us and needing to be distributed to the church-this was leftover stuff from when this house use to hold ministry activities.
1st stage last year was to get it ALL out and sort through it. This was not a fun job. Over 50% of the stuff was not ours and was distributed back to the church or to the thrift store.
What was left was put back in the storage room, but was still very unorganized {although this photo makes it look rather nice}
Every single box that was left needed to be gone through—most of them were boxes from my former Kindergarten teaching day. Boxes filled with good stuff, but also lots of stuff that we wouldn’t use. It was a tedious few days with a huge trash pile but I am finally done! Here’s a glimpse into the room…
This is office/school supply storage {part of it-the rest is in our actual school room} for the most part…
This is the outside station, since the door to the backyard is through this room. Setting u this area has been on my agenda for years and finally-it is complete! Each kid has their own drawer {bathing suits, goggles, hats, sunglasses}. There is a drawer for sunscreen/bug spray and also for smaller outdoor toys. On the left {shelves} there are towels, bubbles, outdoor games and a baseball box. The bottom shelf is unused and I stacked PacMan’s completed 3rd grade books there-woops! There’s a laundry basket on the other side of the room for their wet towels and used bathing suits.
The entire back of the room and one side is theme storage!!! I divided up seasons/holidays on large shelves and then created blue bins for my other top themes.
I created all of the labels in Publisher and printed on cardstock, laminated and put on with double sided tape. Many of the images I used are just Google images {some copyright protected} so I am sorry I can’t share. The borders I used were free digital papers from here. Here’s a screen shot of one of my pages, in case you are interested in duplicating your own version!
I also have a shelf that contains all of our larger toys and puzzles. This area is not sorted exactly the way I want it, but it will do for now, I am exhausted!
My sensory bin storage area is still the same, I just changed up the theme bins I had and made the areas bigger for my themes!
I still keep our books stored in the schoolroom, the same way they are shown in this book storage post. I just moved the seasonal books into the storage room. {no I don’t have a list of the labels I have-I get asked that a lot! Someday I will try to recreate one!}
I sure hope this new clean storage room helps with schooling this year. Having it a huge mess last year was difficult and frustrating! Portions were clean but then they would get messed up because things would overflow! I am praying it will stay organized and simple this year!
See more Behind the Scenes posts here!