Back to School: How to Prepare Every Room of Your House for the New School Year
With the holidays ending and a new school year beginning, it’s time for fresh starts, clear minds and clever organisation. Get 2023 underway on the right foot with these tips for preparing your house for the new year.
Rearrange Your Entryway
When kids leave school, they’ll likely drop their bags, shoes and other bits and pieces in the entryway. Such is the nature of children! Over time, the space becomes cluttered and unsightly.
Rearranging is the best way to get rid of clutter. Start by moving unnecessary items to separate places in the garage or storage cupboards. This gives more room for usable items, making them easier to store and organise.
Next, make everything accessible to your kids. Ensure your children can access the hanging racks, nooks, and drawers to store their items properly.
Ensure your storage systems are as simple as possible. This means open shelves, drawers, and racks. Otherwise, you’ll find uniforms and shoes on the floor.
Organise Your Kids’ Wardrobes
Keeping your kids’ bedrooms clutter-free is often challenging, but it is worth organising their wardrobes.
You can make it more exciting by involving the young ones. Encourage the kids to choose what stays and what gets donated or discarded. They can also fold socks, scarves, and other accessories that require little work.
Use a hanging shelf organiser in their fitted wardrobes to make it easier for kids to see what they’ll wear to school. Ideally, the organiser should have clothes to cover an entire week.
To make weekday dressing easier, keep out-of-season outfits separately and allow them to choose whatever remains. Ensure the items are low enough and accessible to enable kids to dress themselves.
Install Shelves and Bookcases
After organising clothes, focus on books. Use a similar approach to arrange your kids’ academic materials. Make a pile of unneeded ones and donate them to the local library or a school. The rest can go into the home library with a professional bookcase, particularly classics and collectibles.
It’s also advisable to have several book storage areas. You can use a book caddy for the ones you’re currently reading and shelves for displaying your collection.
Deal with the Papers
Students carry a lot of paper from school, including assignments, permission slips, newsletters, and more. If you don’t regularly deal with them, you could find a pile of paperwork cluttering your home.
Selecting what you keep is the best way to avoid unwanted paper piles. Your child might be an upcoming artist, and it’s easy to feel guilty about getting rid of some of their best work. However, keeping everything quickly turns into an unmanageable pile. Before school starts, assess last year’s collection and keep the standout pieces. You can distribute a few to friends and relatives or use them as wrapping paper at the next birthday party.
If your collection still looks overwhelming, consider turning the hard copies into soft copies. Take pictures, store them on your computer, or upload them to cloud storage.
Keep a recycling bin in an accessible spot. Ensure your children get rid of unwanted papers before they pile up.
Update Your Kitchen
Kitchens are always busy, but they get even more crowded and bustling when schools open. You may spend a lot of time preparing and packing food for kids. Sometimes, you’ll juggle cooking while helping your children with their homework. Ensure you declutter your kitchen in readiness for the new school year.
Start by allocating time to prepare packed food. Doing this makes prepping the kids for school every morning much easier. Separate perishables and non-perishables, then refrigerate them to keep them fresh and edible.
Kids get hungry faster because they are naturally active. Creating a dedicated snack drawer is the best way to ensure they don’t constantly complain of hunger. Ensure you provide healthy bites, such as string cheese, dark chocolate, yoghurt, hummus, etc.
Create Study Rooms
There are many ways of creating a study room for your kids. It doesn’t have to be an entire room – if you have limited space, the dining table can serve as the homework zone.
You can convert one corner into a home office if you have room. You only need a desk and a table lamp to create an environment for working on schoolwork and academic projects. For older children with demanding assignments, a quiet room or your dedicated study room is ideal.
Sometimes, you might use the child’s bedroom as the study area. Ensure it has a comfortable desk, chair, and other essentials.
Organise Stationery
It can be challenging to keep track of your kid’s stationery. It’s typical that things become misplaced, forcing you to purchase the same items repeatedly if you aren’t careful.
Many parents use plastic jars for keeping pens, pencils, rulers, and other school supplies. However, these are still vulnerable to misplacement. To avoid this, you should add drawer dividers to your bookshelf. They’re more practical for storing stationery.
Adhere to a Defined Schedule
Give your children time to adjust to the back-to-school routine. This means introducing them at least two weeks before the opening date. Ensure they start going to bed earlier and wake up on time. Also, reschedule mealtimes to sync with the school timetable.
Final Words
Readying your kids for the new school year is a hectic process. However, you can make it easy through early preparation. Ensure you re-organise your house so essential school supplies are accessible to your children.
For instance, school uniforms must be clean and neatly arranged in the closet. Likewise, your fridge should have healthy snacks to keep the young ones full as they wait for mealtimes.
Ease your children into the school routine. At Betta Wardrobes, we specialise in making high-quality and reliable built-in wardrobes like sliding wardrobes, mirrored wardrobes etc. Contact us today to get the best closets, cupboards and bookcases for your house.
