Underhill Academy Takes Shape How is homeschooling like moving? Everything changes, and everything has to be moved. Well, maybe it only feels that way.

This is how the Family Room looked at the start of the project. Note the Lego-strewn desk and table, the haphazardly packed blue wire shelves, the piles...


Stage One: Clean out under the desk and table, consolidate legos

	Note the cleared desk, the elimination of piles around the desk, and Max playing with something he hadn't seen in a year or more.

The Legos were a particular challenge, and weren't completely done until the very end, because we kept finding legos up to and including the final floor sweeping.

	Once the Legos were basically organized, though, the rest of the room could start shifting. Note that the keyboard moves from next to the Lego table over to where the pie chest with the games was, and vice versa.

Next, the wire shelves, which had become more or less random collections of... stuff.

	Once the shelves were emptied, we turned them sideways, to make room for that shiny new (OK, we've had it for ten years, but we haven't used it in a while and I cleaned it up) table and new (actually new, thanks to Grandma Marcia) drawers.

With the basic infrastructure in place, it was time for finishing touches: the built-in shelves, and then... putting everything that he was keeping back somewhere. This meant putting stuff back in the wire shelves (saving the top ones for folders) and other places, including a lot of toys and mementoes which needed to go in his room.


So, after a lot of that, the room finally looks like this:

	As you can see, the wire shelves are still mostly empty -- a lot of stuff is going upstairs -- and the balls and games are under control.

Now we're moving on to phase two of the project. Phase two? Yeah, well when you change part of a system -- in this case a major room in a household -- that much, it affects other parts of the system. Look at the office:

Moving Woody's old desk out of there, and making room for school files, meant processing and shredding large quantities of old papers, moving a file cabinet to make room for the desk, and generally reexamining how a lot of things were stored. I went through years worth of bills and papers, sorting and shredding and recycling. We've found things long thought lost -- that second bin for frisbees and balls was full of miscellaneous stuff we didn't know what to do with when we moved, including Japanese chopstick holders in the shape of tops and the instruction manuals to most of the power tools I bought in Hawai'i.

Now we're working on Max's room: moving a few boxes of toys upstairs means that we need room for more stuff, so he's doing the same process there: pull out everything, decide whether it's garbage, give-away or keep, and figure out how to put it all back. And we just bought a few hundred dollars worth of frames for posters and pictures that hadn't been put up yet. We'll be done... someday.

Many thanks to Grandma Marcia for her help getting the process started and moved to the middle stages.  ¶ Friday, July 29, 2011 2 comments