The Four-Room* Schoolhouse

Yesterday I finished the curtains for the bedroom in our schoolhouse, with a great dramatic sigh of relief.  Then I remembered that I still need to make London shades to cover the French doors.  (Personally, if I were sleeping out here, I'd never cover any of the windows, but our guests get a little creeped out by the total blackness at night.)  So I'm off to the fabric store Monday to buy the last yards of fabric and will be extremely glad to have this project off the list!  I think that makes about 55 yards of fabric sewn, and I am a little tired of sewing curtains.

Here's a little peek of what it looks like in our main schoolroom.  There's no art or maps or anything on the walls yet because I haven't landed on what I want just yet.  These photos are from my phone and don't do it justice; it turned out really cute and so much better than its earlier state as the home to the treadmill and big screen TV!

We are very fortunate to have an entire wall of built-ins in the main room.  (To the left of this picture is a sink/counter area behind cabinet doors, a microwave, and a mini fridge also behind closed doors.  This used to be a mother-in-law suite, so it is a perfect space for homeschooling!)  I haven't arranged the shelves yet but just stuck up the books we need to finish the school year.  Every morning I light our candle and drink coffee from my strawberry mug.  It's a great way to start the morning!

We quickly found that the screened-in porch off the bedroom is perfect for quiet reading.  My husband sits out here every morning for his quiet time, and then the boys come out to do their daily personal reading.

Or they curl up on the couch in the main room.

I bought this table new and immediately painted it, which made my husband's eyes bug out, but I saw this idea on Pinterest and loved it.  The table is much happier painted this way, I'm sure of it.  And the porch has the same checkerboard pattern on the floor, so they tie together really well.

This is the little bedroom.  It has been rearranged since this photo, and the piles will need to be put away, and there are now curtains on the windows and pillows with pillowcases behind the black pillows, but you get the idea.  My husband originally despised the black fabric but has come around to its lovely vintage happiness :)

I also painted an unused armoire black and painted the insides of the doors in chalkboard paint, and we use that to house our chalk and dry erase markers.  All the blocks and preschool toys go in the cabinets beneath, and someday we'll get a TV to put inside, for watching science videos and things like that.  Right now, it's home to a million paint cans from painting everything!

I used the bedroom closet as office space and moved our computer desk into it, then covered it with a curtain.  We do use our guest house bedroom probably 30 days a year, but I figured that since we do school 180+ days a year, I needed the closet more for office space than for guests' clothes.  (I'll have to figure that out this week, though--my husband's sister and her family are spending a couple weeks here in June and will need some hanging space!)

Once our shed is built I can move the tools out of the lower cabinets and move the rest of school in, and once the bookshelf up in the Happy Room-turned-boys' bedroom is painted, I can figure out which books are going where.  Until then, the Happy Room floor is literally covered in books, but since it's upstairs, I can pretend the piles don't exist for now :)

I'll take more pictures once I've decorated the walls and finished the bedroom.  I'm really pleased with how things have turned out, and we are loving our little space for school!  It's funny how spaces in our home have gone unused until a moment of inspiration struck, and then once we've started using them, we couldn't figure out how we lived without them!

(*Four-Room:  family room, bathroom, bedroom, porch.  In our climate, the porch can be used 9+ months of the year.)