How to get home-office, back-to-school, and family scheduling centers functionally organized, and artfully decorated. Use very little money to add-on, redecorate, or repurpose what you already have on hand.
Home Office Bulletin Boards
For the look of subtle elegance make a stylish, fabric-covered cork bulletin-board for your work area, like this decoratively-functional “Creative Nook”. Or frame a bulletin-board as seen “In the Pocket”, designed to hold important books, or documents from Better Homes & Gardens.
An ornately-framed antique mirror can be magnetized, and then painted with chalk board paint to store pictures, notes, and other important family messages as seen in this aqua-colorized “Chalk Magnet Mirror”. Learn how to make other stylish, decorator shades of roll-on chalkboard paints in “Mix it Up”.
Chalkboard a Child’s Room
If you are not sure how to keep your kids from painting or writing on the walls of their room, try painting at least one area of the room with chalkboard paint, in black, or any shade to match their décor (as shown above). This fun “Chalkboard Stencil” of a pretend dining room, has the potential for many lavish tea parties, as well as helping homeschoolers work out math problems.
You don’t need to paint all the walls this way, but one solution would be painting half way up the walls with chalkboard paint, in your choice of colors, and then apply alphabet-wallpaper border trim, above the chalkboard, around the room. Supply your kids with plenty of colored chalks to practice their alphabet lettering.
Kitchen Scheduling Centers
Coastal Living online shows us how functional, and fun a large family kitchen-messaging board can be, as shown in this feature “Restoring a Historic Home”, where an entire kitchen wall becomes a giant chalkboard, for scheduling the busiest of households. Decorated clipboards are another solution, to hold appointment paperwork, and then hung from kitchen hooks, ready to grab-and-go like this “Clipboard Artwork”.
More great ways for grab-and-go schedule organization can be found in “What to Bring to a Child’s Fall or Winter Sporting Event”. BHG.com has printable labels for family-schedule record-keeping, to fast-track everything from important paperwork to freezer-storage, as well as keeping homework files separated by individual children’s bins, as shown in “Strategic Storage”.
Back-to-School Bulletin Boards
My Classroom Ideas.com has some very clever ideas for elementary school teachers to use, and prepare “Back-to-School Bulletin-Boards” for classrooms, or homeschooling (15 pages of examples). You will find everything from movie nights and pumpkin patches, to ocean scenes and children’s literary themes, plus so much more.
For back-to-school organizing, use these printable zebra-striped animal labels for elementary student’s cubbies as shown in “Kids’ Labels”, and “Tagging Along” penguin tie-tags; or try these “File It Away” dotted and stripy stick-ons, for labeling artwork, and other school projects. All these solutions will help you take charge of your family’s scheduling, so that you will have more time to enjoy family life.
