Re-organizing things

The weekend before Princess' party and a week long VBS at our church I just HAD to declutter my dining room and playroom and reorganize them.  I'm happy I did though.  It was a lot of work and the house looked worse before it looked better but now it looks great.  Wanna see?

It looked like that.  See that corner in the left?  School stuff.  LOTS and LOTS of it.  In no particular order.  It just kept multiplying.  I'd had enough.  It gave me a headache to see it there.  So I posted on one of the forums I frequent and the super great organizer girls threw out all sorts of ideas at me.  Once I settled on something I thought would work for us I went with it.  Part of the debate was whether to even keep school in the dining room.  I decided to have separate "Centers"  the dining room is now our "Art class" all of our crafts supplies are still there.  The three R school is in the playroom now.  And after our yard sale next month we'll have a nature center in the laundry room for the kids to collect rocks and other nature things (no bugs or animals though).

So without further ado this was the end result of the dining room:

Soo much better right?  I can breath.  There aren't things all over the place.  It's so nice.  I also put up a bulletin board to the right there.  I haven't started really using it yet but I'm gonna.

Now for our main school area in the playroom.

Don't mind the mess.  This was on a day that the kids played.  hahahahaha  I totally crack myself up.  It looks like this nearly every day.  It's a mess.  It doesn't look like this in the after pictures though.  And I'm telling you that EVERY stinking toy in that room has a place that it belongs.  So we moved the kids' bookshelf into the living room next to the couch.  Because that is where we read so our reading center is in the living room.  That truly leaves this room for circle time and math, writing, phonics work.  Which is GREAT!  Oh and that table in the top before picture wasn't always there.  I moved it in here in prep to move school in here before I snapped the pics.

And after (Ignore the things on the table - I haven't quite gotten all the kinks worked out in here).

I'm weighing the idea of using workboxes this year.  I haven't made a decision about that yet.  If I decided to I'd get two more shelf units like the one in the first picture (in the corner there, see?) and put them one on each side of the table but like I said I haven't decided yet.  I don't think I need them but I can always re-evaluate as the school year progresses.

So what do you think?  I personally love it.  I'm very happy with it and I'm glad I took the plunge.  I LOVE having my dining room look like a dining room with some kid stuff in it instead of a kid room that we're intruding on to eat. lol   And I think it's worth mentioning that I did this re-do on a budget of no money.  I did end up purchasing the stools that are under the table in the school room.  I got them for 5.00 each at goodwill.  I would have had to purchase seating one way or another.  I need one more seat for the little guy but I'm keeping my eyes open for two more stools.  I guess I can't expect the kids to stand and do school. We already had everything else I used on hand and I just moved things around and re-purposed.