So! New plan! We have a dining room/schoolroom and, on the opposite side of the foyer, in what is supposed to be the formal living room, we will have (after our planned Ikea trip) a library/music room. We're going to buy a bunch of Billy shelves and make them look beautiful, like this: http://www.centsationalgirl.com/2011/11/from-billys-to-built-ins/
Only I'm hoping to round the corner with ours, so there's room for MORE books. All the books! Also, the vintage ceramic skunk or squirrel or....??? that I bought at the thrift store. And some other pretty things. But mostly all the books! I think I also need a house blog. But that is for another day.
Right now, though, that room has our old shelves in it, and a piano, and books overflowing all over the place. But the schoolroom is starting to come together. It is mostly furnished. We painted a few days ago. I still need more stuff for the walls. And to get the giant pile of books on the buffet relocated into the new shelves when they are done. Those lamps are going to go live somewhere else, too. But here you go:
So there's our table and buffet--both housewarming gifts from my Mom, who has a shop that sells such things. Mostly we eat in the kitchen, but it's nice to have the dining room available when we have people over and need more space (the table has another leaf and two more chairs that we can add, and, once the leaf is in, we can pull in kitchen chairs and seat as many as 10 fairly comfortably, I think).
The buffet is very big and holds tons of stuff. On the sides, each kid has his own compartment for books that he uses most days. And then we keep current history books and stuff like markers and pencils and scissors on the shelves in the middle. I'm not taking a picture of the inside, because it's already messy. But that's the point! It can stay messy, because no one sees the inside! Yay! The paint color, which will eventually take over the whole front of the house and maybe the stairwell and upstairs hallway is Benjamin Moore's Nantucket Fog. I was a little obsessive about picking a paint color, and this one is still more blue and less gray than I really meant for it to be, but I'm still loving it so far.
Then, in the corner by the kitchen, we have this cabinet, which we call The Old Lady Cabinet, because Dave says it looks like something an old lady would have. But I think it is pretty:
and the inside of it:
I can show a picture of the inside of it, because I made it look pretty with baskets from Target. The baskets on top are library books and then various books/activities that, in theory, the kids will work on when they have some down time but it's still school time--like when I'm working with one kid and can't move on to the next thing yet. And the baskets have mostly math stuff and art supplies. The idea is supposed to be that Gus (mostly) can pull out one of those smaller baskets and work on math (pattern blocks, geoboards, etc) independently. In actually practice, usually he plays multiplication games or Stack the States on my iphone instead. Which makes all my neat little baskets seem like kind of a pretty waste of space. But we will see how things evolve.
So there you have it. I wanted a room that would be very functional as a schoolroom but still be able to pass as a regular old dining room (particularly since this room and the living room/future library are right at the front of the house--we no longer have a good extra room where we can hide away all the mess and kid stuff), and so far it's working well. We don't have lots of educational posters and kid art work on the walls, but my kids don't produce much artwork and they never really looked at the educational posters anyway. I would like to finally get my stuff together enough to do a timeline somewhere....but we might use the upstairs hallway for that.
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