Hidden In Plain Sight

Remember how I said we were not going to be homeschooling this next year?  I would just like to apologize for being a huge fibber.  We have made some huge changes in our family recently, and decided to steamroll ahead for one more year. (I'm going to be blogging about what we are doing differently, but hint hint it involves the TV.)

Ok so we homeschool in our regular living space.  I'm super selfish, and don't want to dedicate any one space as strictly homeschool.  Our house is much spacier than our last home, but not so spacey that I feel like I can dedicate a room to it.  So here at our house we homeschool in the kitchen.  If you have been hanging around for a while you will know that we have a ginormous (technical term) island that you can read about here.  It is roughly nine feet long by five feet wide.  It can easily seat 12, but I only have seating for 8.  It is one of my favorite things about this house.  It provides tons of space for my girls to spread out their school work, and get to working on it. (or cooking or anything else)

For all that I needed something to store all of our homeschool supplies, and there were plenty of them.  It also needed to look at home in my kitchen.  So I started scouring Craigslist for the perfect piece.  This one Señor Hotness had a demand for, however, I had to find a piece that didn't need to be worked on.  As you all can guess this was so hard for me to agree to because that meant I was going to have to find something that was full price that actually matched my idea of cool.  I was so happy to find something that I loved that looked good with the room, and didn't break the bank.  Thank you desperate movers!

Isn't it beautiful!  My appliances are black so the color was perfect, and the style matched that of my cabinets perfectly.

When we got this the glass was kind of a problem for me.  This piece was all about concealing its actual purpose.  Helping it blend into the background.  Then I had an idea.  It involved tissue paper, my DIY decoupage glue (that you can find here).  I wanted to frost the windows, but I didn't want it to be permanent.  So I was all about mocking the look.  While the front of this is paned the back side of the doors are just one solid piece of glass.  So my thought was that I could just paint decoupage on the backside of the doors where the glass is solid then place the tissue paper over it.  Word to the wise unless you are crazy awesome this WILL wrinkle.  I personally like the wrinkled look.  I used a full-sized sheet on there.  This had excess hanging all over the place.  When the decoupage fully dried I used a butter knife, and gently cute the edges and pulled off the excess.  Then I went over the entire thing with another layer of decoupage glue.  Warning, be careful.  Tissue paper is super fragile period, but its even more fragile when wet.  So this will be crazy easy to tear, but when you are all done it will come out looking like this.

I really like how it turned out, and it was beyond super duper easy to do.

This faux frosting also hid the fact that what is stored in this isn't cutsie dishes, but where I keep our extra curriculum packets, crayons, markers, scissors, counting blocks, etc.

This gives you a view of what we keep inside, and what the inside of the doors look like.

Now let me tell you about the bottom.  In the bottom we keep what I call our "school tubs".  The ladies all have individual containers that hold all the packets that we are currently working on.

The tubs are the perfect fit. 

In the drawers we keep books.

In the crate on the left we keep more books and magazines.

In the crate on the right we keep all of our extra spiral notebooks.

An just to throw everyone off.  We keep the cook books in the metal magazine holders in the middle.

In the end we have a piece that doesn't look out of place in the kitchen, but allows us to have a class room when we need it or a completely mundane kitchen when we want it.  Oh how I wish my entire house was this organized.

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