Cozy minimalism in the school room

I was going to put off dealing with our school room until later in the summer, as the next few weeks are quite busy ones for us, but I decided to squeeze it in this week.

I'm glad I did; there was a lot that needed to be done in there.

I started by listing the purposes for the room:  it is our school room, our library, my office and craft room, and our main entry. It also has the biggest patch of bare floor in the house, which is used for sliding and dancing.

The biggest issue with it was Too Much Stuff. I have for some time been fighting the urge to buy even more things to put in it; a big reason why I wanted to deal with the room sooner rather than later.

The room also has a balance problem; massive bookshelves along one wall that seem to pull that whole side of the room downward. At the other end, there is a smoke detector hanging smack in the middle of prime wall space. Storage for coats and boots and shoes and hats and mittens and gloves and socks and sometimes snow pants has always been challenging.

The first step in the Cozy Minimalist method is to gather inspiration. I zipped over that, mostly, because the budget for this room at this time is zero dollars, and if I have anything that is inspiring for that room right now, it is the word "Gothic".

It took me only several hours to get the room cleared of everything but the main pieces of furniture. I say "only" because of the large number of books involved, over thirty boxes worth.  Then I took a few more hours to wipe things down and dust and vacuum under and behind everything. It was a lot of work, but it was good to get it all done at once, instead of trying to chip away at it a little at a time.

I've started a list of the other things that need to be tended to in the room.

The next thing was to work on the furniture arrangement. I highly prefer to measure the room and furniture and make little scale cutouts that I can scoot around on a graph paper room, although the book recommends just moving the real furniture. It helps me to see possibilities that I wouldn't think of otherwise.

But in the end, the furniture mostly came back to where it started.  A cabinet got promoted into a position in one of the room's focal points, and has been given the job of drawing attention away from that smoke detector. That displaced a so-so bookshelf, which is in a subordinate position that hopefully will help the cabinet balance the other bookshelves.

Next step is to work on rugs and lighting.