Before . . .

When we were in Ohio, I had a reorganizing brainstorm one night. The day before we left to drive to Ohio, we had a Rivendell meeting ar Siri's house. Siri lives in a beautiful old house, and we met in her dining room/schoolroom, which is a huge room at the front of the house. She has a big table in there, along with lots of cupboards, school desks, filing cabinets, etc, as well as plenty of room to move around the table. I left thinking how nice it would be to have so much room. Our dining room is where the boys are doing more and more of their school, and that is often where the laptops end up. But we don't have anything against the wall, so there are always cords stretching to the wall, which are huge tripping hazards! I also store all my science lab supplies in the dining room, and we have this really comfortable pink chair that our neighbors gave us when it didn't sell at a garage sale. So things are pretty crowded in there!

Here are Luke and our neighbor, playing the computer, with school clutter surrounding them. You can see the pink chair in the corner.

This is a better view of the lovely wire shelves, pulled straight from our garage just because I needed SOME kind of shelves right away, where my science lab supplies are. The big box on top is the microscope. And there on the floor is my new (to me) copy of TOG year 2! As a side note, the almond joys on the table are NOT mine. Anyone who knows me knows I absolutely detest coconut with an undying loathing. Just wanted to make that clear.


We do, however, have lots of space in our playroom--which is technically our formal living room, except there is obviously nothing formal about it, LOL. When we moved in (7 years ago?!?!), we knew we didn't want or need another room with a couch, especially one which we never used. So we made the room a playroom, and it has worked out great. We have always had lots of kids playing in it! You can see I didn't trouble myself to really straighten anything up before taking these pictures. I'm all about keeping it real, LOL. But it is a bigger, wider room than the dining room, which got me thinking . . .

So my big brainstorm was to switch the two rooms around, and make the dining room the playroom, and the living room the schoolroom. Wednesday we had friends over in the morning, but starting that afternoon, moving the rooms was our big project for the rest of the week.