Recently I did some organizing and I thought I’d share the results with you!!!
Before I show you the recent BEFORE photos, I must share my dilemma with you and how it got this bad. This room was intended to be homeschool storage only, managed by MOM. As the warm weather hit last year, it was overcome with bikes, skateboards, rip sticks, roller blades, scooters, and MORE. Since we live in the inner city and people will literally hop the fence to steal a scooter so they can scrap the metal for cash, we have to put every riding toy inside, every day. Since this room has the door that leads out to the riding area, guess where the new toy garage was located? Yup, the homeschool storage room; aka ~ garage, utility shed, mudroom and more. I thought we would get a grip this winter when we stored the toys, but the weather stayed mild and we never stored them. So, I knew I had to revamp the room. It got SO out of control thanks to my little ones just throwing their toys everywhere. I couldn’t get to my school stuff to put it away properly so the piles began, and continued, and grew. It was horrible, really horrible. I have proof…
  
This wasn’t even on a really bad day, as some of the riding toys were outside when I snapped this. As you can see, I literally could barely walk in there, let alone find what I was looking for.
Not anymore!!!! We are in the process of building a small outside storage area for riding toys so they don’t get stolen, and in the meantime we have them all stuffed into an outside deck box thingy. I can walk!
Here is our learning toy shelf {the shelf is from Ikea}…
    
My favorite thing about the new learning toy storage area is my new click boxes from Target {below on left with green top}. I love that they are clear and that they can be unclicked and brought right into the schoolroom and put on a tray. I emptied as many toys as I could out of their cardboard boxes and stored them all together in our basement {in case I give them away in the future and need the box}. I also got rid of at least 25-30% of our stuff. I blessed another homeschooling friend who has 3 little ones younger than mine, giving her all sorts of good stuff!
 
About a year ago I wrote a post about storing our sensory bin items. In that post, you can see that we stored things in this area shown below. We still have sensory bins now and then, but not nearly as much as we used to back then. This is also the area that stores misc. Tot Tray supplies. A year ago I sorted our small items by color, but it was time to change that since all 3 of my kids know their colors! Our poor sensory bin area got pretty bad too, as you can see on the left, I cleaned it all up as you can see on the right!
   
The drawers still store our small items, they are just not sorted by color groups now, but by like items. Here are 2 drawers…
 
This is the door that leads to the outside play area and it had gotten out of control too. I didn’t take any before shots. These are the after, all set up for springtime weather. I added a shoe organizer to the back door, I was sick of the big pile of nasty shoes in the basket. On the left is an assortment of items my kids use regularly outside in the warmer weather.
  
  
I did one more simplifying task, on the door that leads into the school storage room! I bought a nice shoe organizer from Target and made a school/office supply zone.
I can’t share the cards I made since I grabbed most of my images straight from Google, but here are the categories I have in case you are curious:
- rulers
- watercolor paint
- scissors
- colored pencils
- paint brushes
- tape
- index cards
- notepads
- pencils
- pens
- highlighters
- Sharpies
- Dry Erase Markers
- Vis a Vis Markers
- Modeling Clay
- See the Light Art tools
- Chapstick {since we are all always losing it}
- glue
- gluesticks
- shaving cream {for fun like this!}
- craft cups {disposable}
- erasers
- sticky notes
- index cards
My thought process was categories that many family members are commonly looking for. This door is in our dining room which connects to both our kitchen and schoolroom. It is a very central location for all of us.
One last thing I did to help simplify homeschooling craft time was to clear off our hutch in the dining room and create an area to store paint supplies.
I got the silver tins from Target recently for $2.50/each. In them: cloth napkins {for meals and art}, small paint trays & baby wipes, a few tempera paint bottles {our smaller ones}, paint shirts/smocks, paper towels. It looks so much cleaner and more simple, and has already been a big help!
