Creating An Organisation Station For A Large Family – School Bags & Chores

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This is a guest post by Jac from Common Chaos Chronicle

There is nothing worse than walking through the door and tripping over several school bags that have been tossed in the entry-way as the children have arrived home from school. This I know, as I have done it on more than one (or 101) occasions!!!

For those ‘Organised Housewife’ readers that don’t know me, my name is Jac and I write a blog called Common Chaos Chronicle. I have a step daughter, 5 kids of my own and in less than 2 weeks time we will be welcoming another little bundle into our family. While I love to share (and over-share) about the chaos and mayhem a large family can bring, I spend a lot of my time coming up with new ways, systems and routines to put in place to make life at home a much easier, more functional experience! Today I want to share with you all my latest attempt at keeping the Monsters organised. For this project I set out to create an area where the children could store their school bags off the floor, but also have a reference point for their chores, weekly activities, etc, etc…. So here is what I came up with:

So how did I do it? I wanted a whiteboard type system that I could note things down on but then easily erase, but I also wanted it all to tie in with our office colour scheme so I decided that I would use frames instead. I purchased some large frames from our local Reject Shop for $6.00 each.

A regular whiteboard marker writes well on the glass and can be wiped off just like a whiteboard! Once I had the frames, I just fiddled around on our computer making up a section at a time of things I thought would be useful for the children and myself.

• Name & Photos.
• Day’s of the week to write in appointments and activities.
• Monthly Jobs/chores
• A reward tick chart for positive behaviour and completing jobs.
• A notes section for any school notes that come home or anything I need to write down to tell them.

Once I had glued down the printouts to a white piece of card, I put the frames together ready to hang on the wall. The next step was to create a space for the bags to hang up, as I was fed up with them being dumped on the floor all the time. I checked out a few craft places and ended up buying the backing craft wood from Spotlight and the craft wood letters from Bunnings. Whilst at Bunnings I also picked up a couple of packs of plastic coated hooks.

 

When the paint had dried, I had hubby first attach the plaques to the wall and then attach the letters to the plaques using some tiny nails. As we have trouble finding the wall studs in our house, and me wanting everything ‘evenly spaced’ etc, we decided to screw a piece of dress pine to the wall where the bag rack was to be rather than putting heaps of misplaced holes into the plaster work! Really worked a treat, made the job a heap easier and actually looks like it’s just meant to be that way!

The very last thing I did was purchase some cute bulldog type clips from Officeworks to stick over the notes section of the notice boards. I must say, if you’re going to attempt this, do have a try of the clips before you buy them as the first lot I purchased were really really tough to squeeze and I was certain they would crack the frame glass. When I found suitable ones at Officeworks, I used a tiny square of felt under each one for added glass protection and hot glue gunned them all on into place.

And so far, after a month of the new space being in action, it’s working really well. The children know to hang their bag, jumper &/or coat, check their jobs and for notes and they never ever forget to remind me to add their reward points!!! It was definitely worth creating the new space at Chaos HQ.

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