Our New House: School Room

Continuing with the "our new house" theme I thought I would share the information about our new school room! One of the deal breakers for me when looking for a new house was that it had to have a room dedicated to homeschooling. When teaching 4 children at home there is a lot of paper, books, pencils, art supplies, etc that is involved. I was getting overwhelmed with trying to keep up with everything and I very much wanted my bedroom closet to be school book free again. When we decided to rent this house I immediately claimed the formal dining room as the new school room.  It was the perfect size, had hardwood floors, and a massive window seat where I could picture my kids curled up with a good book for hours at a time. Yeah.....in reality it is used for a stage and playing my little ponies but a girl can dream can't she?!

As I mentioned in my previous post we painted the entire downstairs Silver Sheen. Pretty simple to do the planning for and I was able to use the leftover paint from the adult living room. Total for paint: $0 (already counted it in the budget for adult living room).

The curtains were another waverly design, this time Fun Floret Spa. This fabric was a bit pricer then the living room fabric but it was so pretty I had to get it. Since it is a large picture window I bought 4 yards and made panels for each side of the window. At $15.14 per yard that is $60.60 for custom curtains.

 Next up was storage. I needed a lot of storage! I decided to checkout what ikea had to offer and found this massive shelving system for only $139. You seriously can't beat that price!

I also had a small wall in the corner of the room that I didn't want to leave bare. I fell in love with this hanging bookshelf. It was a bit pricier at $49.99 but it took care of a need and fit a wonky location so I went for it.

Of course we needed a table and chairs for the room as well. We went with an unfinished pine table that seats 4 for $69 and then painted the legs light blue and the top in a chalkboard finish. I love that the kids can write on the table instead of using scratch paper. It saves on paper usage and the preschoolers especially love to write their ABC's on there. The short stubby pieces of chalk seem to be easier for them to hold correctly versus the long pencils. For chairs we again shopped on ikea and found these chairs for $12.50 per chair. Seriously you can't get a folding chair for that these days! I think they are adorable!

The big splurge in the room was the cabinet for storing art supplies and the printer and laminator. I didn't want to be looking at this stuff everyday and needed closed door storage to keep little fingers off of things. I looked everywhere and was about to the point of building something myself when I decided to check out our local Amish furniture store. They had this amazing solid wood unit with punched tin doors. I had to have it. The color is a bit off (I would have really liked a white one) but it works in the room and I love the detail in the doors. At $400 it was the most expensive thing in the room for sure.

With the furniture taken care of it was time for the little decorative touches. I found a large white frame at a discount store for $20 and turned it into a chalkboard. I pulled two perfectly good cork boards out of the bulk trash on base to use for displaying artwork, brought our girls easel and "special things" cabinets into the room, and hung our  history timeline and project posters. All in all the room meets all our needs quite nicely.

Total Spent: $788.59

Not too bad considering the large storage pieces!