Finding space in your home to teach your child can be a huge challenge if you’re living in a small house or flat. So, how can you do it?
If you’re reading this, you’ve likely decided to continue home-schooling, even post-COVID. If that’s the case, you’ve probably already reduced your hours at work, planned your child’s curriculum, and filled out all the necessary paperwork. Now, all you have left is to clear some space for the actual teaching.
Your two options are to either make space in your current home or speak to a conveyancing solicitor in Plymouth, London or wherever you live to buy a new house. Especially if home schooling has become a permanent fixture in your home, perhaps a new home might be the answer.
That said, if upgrading to a larger house isn’t something you can feasibly afford, there are some solutions! Here, we’ve written some ideas to help you make space in your current home to home school your child.
8 Ways to Make Space to Home School Your Child
Before we get into how to make space to home school your child, you need to decide where you’re going to do it.
Remember, your home schooling area doesn’t need to look like a classroom, it just needs to function as one. Try to pick somewhere with a flat surface, good lighting and a decent amount of space you can clear out.
Once you’ve decided on a location, it’s time to make some space!
1. Declutter your shelves
If the space you’ve chosen has lots of shelves that are completely full, try moving the stuff on them into more reasonable storage. You can use these shelves as places to keep your child’s books and learning utensils.
This can mean taking up more floor space, which is why you need to think out of the box by buying some boxes that hang on your door. No floor space or new cabinets required.
2. Improve your storage
On that same note, the best way to make space to home school your child is to get better storage. Having things lying on the ground or sitting on a single shelf or surface is alright when you’re happy with the amount of space you have.
However, if you’re looking to make space, there’s always an opportunity to turn a single shelf into stacked shelves, a short cabinet into a taller cabinet, and generally use your floor space more efficiently.
3. Buy some multifunctional furniture
Expanding on your current storage space is one thing, but how about turning something that isn’t used for storage into storage?
For example, you can buy a sofa that has storage space underneath it or use a chest as a coffee table. Storage is something every family is looking to get more of and with that demand comes more products that turn everyday furniture into storage.
4. Get more storage in your garden
Home schooling your child is more important than saving a few inches on your garden, so if you have the space, use it.
Sheds, summerhouses, and bike storage facilities will all take stuff from your home and free up space permanently. It’s definitely a good option when it comes to freeing up space to home school your child.
5. Use the attic or cellar
If you have an attic or cellar, but don’t want to put anything in them because they’re too hard to retrieve items from, you should start prioritising what you do and don’t need to have frequent access to.
There’s no point in wasting attic or cellar space just to have rarely-used items sitting within arm’s reach. You’ll be needing a lot of space to teach your child and store your equipment, all of which will be used more frequently than many other things in your house.
6. Install pegboards
For those who don’t know, pegboards are vertical walls with holes in that you can put pegs into. They’re very malleable as you can hang pretty much anything from them and even add little shelves.
Because they’re vertical they don’t take up any floor space so could be really handy when it comes to clearing up some space for home schooling your child.
7. Dry your clothes on a hanging rack
If you currently dry your clothes using a standing drying rack, you could save space by switching it out for one that hangs over your door or by your window.
Metal hanging racks are surprisingly strong and can hold pretty much all the clothing a standing drying rack can. The benefit of these racks is more floor space, which means more space for desks, seats and teaching!
8. Accommodate guests in the living room
Instead of keeping a spare room available for guests, why not convert your living room into a guest room. All you have to do is install a sofa bed.
Sofa beds used to be synonymous with tacky furniture but these days, with more people living in flats and smaller homes, there are all kinds of sofa beds to choose from. You no longer have to compromise on having a terrible sofa just to accommodate guests anymore.
Also, if you really want to clear as much space as possible to home school your child you can buy a daybed. Daybeds pull out into beds but also have storage underneath them as well, meaning you free up an entire room and have extra storage to boot.
Ready to Start Making Space in Your Home?
In this post, we’ve shared a lot of ideas on how to make space to home school your child, but there are many more out there. With more parents home schooling their children, more people working from home, and generally smaller living spaces due to COVID-19, space saving ideas are all the rage in 2021.
This means there are more ideas out there for you to find, but hopefully the ones shared in this article are enough to help you clear some space to home school your child. Otherwise, you may have to seriously consider upsizing your home, and getting in touch with a conveyancer to help. Thank you for reading, and good luck making space.
Homeschooling - Photo by Jessica Lewis on Unsplash
Furniture - Photo by Nathan Van Egmond on Unsplash
Pegboard - Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash [JC1]
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