Our Homeschool Home | We rearrange the whole house and turn a bedroom into a school room.

I like to rearrange. It helps me clean and organize my home, so Our Homeschool Home series on the blog continues. We have been in this rental house for 9 years, and this is the first time I have had a school room in this house. It was born to save my sanity and make my husband happy when he walks through the door.

About 6 months after my two grown boys moved out of the house, while dealing with a crisis in my marriage, I made a drastic move. It's true. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I practically rearranged the whole house in the process.

I moved Eliana into the laundry room, so I could move the two youngest boys into her room. Then I moved everything from my office library downstairs to the living room. I moved Dylan into that room and Eliana into his old room. I moved school upstairs to the two boys' old bedroom (once Nathan and Dylan, then Malachi and Boaz).

So, I rearranged the whole house to turn a bedroom into a school room. This won't be possible in our next house, so I will enjoy it while I can.








My poor dining room and living room don't look as lived in and loved when we don't spend our time there during the day (we just repainted and will be moving soon, so I only hung up the necessities), but it is much easier to keep clean, and I actually have dishes in the cabinet instead of books.



To see how these rooms used to be filled with books and love, please see:


My husband is a minimalist who needs things orderly. Now, when he walks through the door, he is comforted by the fact that there is nothing in our living room except furniture to sit on. If this room alone is clean, he can handle anything else, so this is his safe room.

Our new school room is at the very back of the house. You don't even need to walk by it, and at first, I banned him from the room, lol. It's my safe place. I want to be able to leave a project out if I want to without being judged or worrying how it will affect him.

This has helped our marriage significantly.

I like that it is lived in and comfortable. In fact, I stay upstairs most of the day now, unless I am in the kitchen preparing a meal, a snack, or my favorite herbal tea.


In my school room, I can leave a nature display on the table for the kids to look at, enjoy, or play with if I want to. We can even have tea. Kids can work on a project and leave it out for a few days, if needed.

I encourage the kids to play in their bedrooms, which are upstairs to keep the downstairs clean. But, we still don't just school in the school room. We all pile on the king size bed in the master bedroom or on the sitting chair in the corner, while Bo plays Playmobil on the floor for couch subjects. We even do desk subjects on my bed.

Often, we take our reading outside to sit in the warm morning sun or sit on a blanket in the shade in the afternoon.

I can only rearrange one wall in the school room, but I've rearranged it (as you can see!) several times in the past eight months. It's the back wall where I now have my chair, and square coffee table from Ikea, and a crib mattress for a little reading corner.




I don't mind it this way because I like the square coffee table for books. Everything I need is in this little corner.


There is a cozy little fort behind my chair in the closet where Eliana sits when I read aloud. She has a backrest pillow with arms and a reading quilt to keep her comfortable. 

If the Lord wills it, we will move to a new house that is being prepared for us. This new house will truly be a blessing, but I will not have a school room, nor storage for books, so I will have to get creative to keep our space not only functional, but neat and tidy. I have many of our daily school books in bags or baskets, so perhaps I will have those tucked away in a cupboard like we did at our last house which was so small that we schooled in the kitchen and kept our books in a kitchen cupboard!

There is always a way to make your homeschool space work. I share this post to document our life, not to share how creative or functional our learning spaces are (it's taken me 8 months to share it!). I'm sure I would regret it, though, if I didn't have this post to look back on once we move. As much as I hope to love our own home, I will miss this house! I've learned to be content here, after all, and it is is in an amazing location near to my husband's work, the library, two beautiful parks, a walking path, and a short walk downtown to shops, the street fair, and the farmer's market. It's really been a wonderful place to homeschool and raise my family. ❤️


6 comments

  1. I love it! It seems very warm and comforting. I could spend the day in there too

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  2. So sad, do you have to move? I am sad but happy for your new, next adventure awaiting you and your family!

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  3. Your homeschool room is so pretty! It looks like such an inviting place to study and learn. We're still in the school stuff all over the living room and family room stage of life, lol. It will be quite a while before I can free up a bedroom, but maybe someday.

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  4. Kimberly, thank you! :)

    Anon, we will be moving, but to house that will be our own, so this will be a good move. :) It will be a 30 minute commute for my husband to get to work, but the house we built in Montana is a 3 hour drive, so we can work on this one more easily. We will be "renting to own" until our house in Montana sells, and then we will be able to buy the house. It needs a lot of work, but once it is finished, it will be a great home for us. The amazing part is that we will get to live in it while we fix it up, and that will save us money. :)

    Rachel, thank you! We will be back in that stage again very soon. I will have to figure out how to make it work - the nice thing is hubby will have a 30 minute commute, so if he texts me before he leaves, we could do a tidy before he gets home. Where we live now, we are so close to his work that he is literally home in one minute, and I never know when he will walk in the door. We will have one less bedroom in the new house, but the bedrooms are bigger. It will be a few years before Dylan moves out, but when he does, his room would be perfect because it's just off the kitchen. Until then... I am brainstorming ways we can keep it clean. :)

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  5. This is so dreamy! I am sort of mourning the loss of this space for you but completely understand the excitement that comes with owning a home soon!

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  6. I just found your blog for the first time and I've been browsing pages for a couple of hours, haha! (Easily distracted!) I've been home schooling for 23 yrs and we've moved multiple times. We have been in our current house for 13 yrs. I cannot seem to get the homeschooling stuff organized no matter what I do, so often times we can't find things and we start using something else instead...I was going to convert half of our family room into a school room, but it's mostly piled up with boxes of books (and my husband's scrap wood because he's a woodworker and saves everything. We end up doing school in the dining room and living room instead. Oh well! You're areas are very neat, organized and inviting. Thank you for sharing...

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