How to Set Up Your House For Back to School At the End of Summer

It’s that time of the year again. Alarms are going off, kids are rushing down the stairs to grab their lunch packs, frantically gathering their notebooks before heading out to catch the school bus. With the school season upon us, is your house ready to cope with the hectic lifestyle that it entails? Fortunately, there are tons of ways you can revamp your house to welcome the new academic year. From decluttering techniques to setting up a study zone, you’ll be turning what seems to be a season of chaos into a light autumn breeze.

Keeping Your House Up to Speed

From morning rituals to afternoon habits, the start of the school year will bring about many changes. You can prevent your house from falling apart in the process by taking some basic yet effective measures. 

Put Your Kitchen On the Fast Lane

Getting Your Kitchen Ready for the School Season

As the school year takes off, your kitchen may need to adapt to a new morning routine. With some simple steps, you can avoid a possibly chaotic setting by prepping your galley for the high tides.

Set Up a Grab-and-Go Zone for School Lunches

For everyone’s convenience, you can designate a zone such as a kitchen trolley with shelves for lunch packs. In the mornings, you can just pack up your kids’ lunches and place them on the top shelf. Once the little champs come back from school, have them return the lunchboxes to the same place to avoid clutter around the house.

Create an Area for Snacks

Treat your kids with a low drawer or pantry shelf designated for healthy yet tasty snacks like granola bars, whole-grain crackers, and dried fruits. You can take organization a step further by dividing the snacks into categorized compartments. Additionally, you can keep a bowl of fruits on the kitchen table for quick, vitamin-packed snacks your family can enjoy. Make sure to wash the fruits before putting them out.

Clear a Storage for Containers

To keep all your tupperware and ziplock bags in one place, consider clearing out a cabinet shelf for them; if your cabinetry is fully packed, you could opt for an add-on storage bin instead. A designated area for your food containers will allow you to save up time that would otherwise be wasted searching for them.

Reorganize Your Fridge

Consider setting up a shelf in your fridge for your kids’ lunch that you’ve prepared the day before, in addition to juice boxes and veggies. In the morning, you could just take them out of the fridge, pack them up and place the pack in the grab-and-go zone. A lower shelf would accommodate yogurt, carrots, and other refreshing snacks your kids (and you) can enjoy after school or on weekends.

Tip: Make zip-lock bags your best friends and pre-pack most of your week’s lunch menu on the weekend: cheese sticks, grapes, carrots and cucumber sticks are all things you can prepare and store in advance, and throw into lunch bags in the morning.

Get Your Mudroom Ready for Everyday Traffic

Getting Your Kitchen Ready for the School Season

When the school season kicks off, your mudroom will most likely be a very busy area. When your kids get back from school, they will be tossing their backpacks and arts and crafts projects at the nearest place possible. Having a neatly organized mudroom would reduce or, if you’re lucky enough, eliminate the hassle of cleaning it up every afternoon. 

Add Wicker Baskets

Since a mudroom is a relatively small area, it may get cluttered pretty easily. One smart solution for small area storage is to organize everything in wicker baskets that go under a bench.

Designate Personal Coat Hangers 

As for jackets, consider opting for coat hooks instead of bulky racks that take up extra space. Coat hooks can also be a smart solution for hanging backpacks, which would otherwise take up a lot of floor or bench space.

Keep the Mud In the Mudroom

The last thing you’ll have time for early fall is sweeping and vacuuming on a daily. Keep a floor mat inside as well, to avoid tracking in dirt. Other solutions are to designate cubbies for everyone’s shoes. And an especially wise investment is an outdoor rug for the indoors; they can handle the grit and offer a lovely decor boost to your mudroom.

Keep Your Family Posted With a Schedule Board

Staying Posted With a Schedule Board

With the academic year comes endless PTA meetings, dance practices, doctor’s appointments, soccer matches, exams, and so on. To keep up with it all and make sure everyone’s on the same page, consider setting up a schedule board in your mudroom or kitchen. This can either be a whiteboard, a chalkboard, or a bulletin board. If you end up choosing a chalkboard, expect to clean up some chalkdust around the board every now and then. A bulletin board, for instance, can include anything from to-do lists, post-it notes, to scheduled calendars, arts projects, and even photos of an upcoming trip for motivation.

Organization Tips for the Homework Season

As the school days rush by, it’s very easy for clutter to pile up when you and your kids are caught up with your respective paperwork and supplies always in circulation. Some basic Marie Kondo tips of organization would help you declutter everything that’s left lying around; notebooks, crayons, iPads, and everything in between will have their own place in a study area or a home office. While you can handle the initial process of the organization, it’s also important to teach your kids how to stay organized and responsible along the way. 

Keeping Papers at Bay

One issue you’ll be dealing a lot with over the course of a school year is the influx of paper stuff. Almost everyday, more will be making their way into your house; from syllabi at the start of the school season, to quizzes and tests later on. One ideal way would be to dedicate a drawer with dividers where you can sort all the papers in categories. Syllabuses go in one place, quizzes go in another, report cards and all other important papers will have their own respective folders. Consider recycling unneeded papers like outdated announcements and that disciplinary notice you dread so much.

Organizing School Supplies

Keeping office supplies near the homework station allows your kids to maintain productivity. Instead of having to leave their desk to fetch something from who knows where, they would have instant access to all the supplies they need — and less excuses for procrastinating. Here again, containers and organization totems are your friend. Whether you have a drawer, open shelf, or a bookshelf to work with, storage trays will allow you to categorize  everything gracefully. For pens, pencils, and markers, consider creating a DIY pencil holder which might motivate your kids to actually make use of the organization tools. 

Be Ready for the School Year With Organization Hacks at Home

Making Use of Cubbies

Shelving can be an ideal method for organization as well as decluttering. To free up space on the desk, you can move books, notebooks, and binders over to cubbies. Your kid just brought home an A+ science project? A cubby could be a perfect place to display it. Consider getting one that has compartments of different sizes to accommodate a variety of your kids’ paraphernalia. 

Professional Organization Tactics that Everyone Will Benefit From

Baskets

When it comes to leisure time, some of your young ones may have extracurriculars going on after school and some may just like to play videogames while taking a break from studying. Either way, you are bound to come across extra hobby related supplies to store as well; arts and crafts supplies, electronic devices, baseball mitts or cleats will need their space. A perfect storage solution for this would be more wicker baskets. They are available in many forms and sizes, so you can use wicker baskets for other storage purposes as well; you can have one in the laundry room as an extra hamper, or in the living room for blankets. If you have a cat, though, don’t be surprised to find it sleeping in one of the baskets.

Ideas for Study Zones

You don’t need to go above and beyond to decorate the study area. Simply a calm and tidy set-up would be an ideal environment for your little genius to study in. 

Convenient Homework Desk

Providing Your Straight-A Student With the Ideal Homework Zone

For your kids’ convenience, consider a study desk in close proximity to the aforementioned storage solutions. Should the little scientists need a gadget from the cubbies for their biology assignment, they can just scoot right over to grab it. 

Teamwork Zone

Study Desk Ideas for Two

Back to school means a great deal of socializing and making friends; this in turn means they would be studying in groups from time to time. Consider a desk for two in case your outgoing offspring brings a classmate over for a teamwork project. This might also be a great idea for siblings who prefer studying together.

Laid-Back Study Area

Lively Designs for a Reading Zone

For a more casual setting, you could bring in some colorful bean bags into the study area. A cubby with some educational books can be a great addition as well. Your little bookworm will be looking forward to a reading session while snuggled up in an unimposing setting.

Lockdown Study Zone

Ideal Setups for Online Learning from Home

Ever since the world was struck by Covid-19, studying and schooling from home has become somewhat of a norm. You never know when your kids might have to put in much more than the usual two or three-hour homework sessions and follow their entire curriculum from home again. An ideal study environment would allow for both comfort as well as concentration. For instance, consider a seat that is comfortable enough to sit on for extended periods of time and create an opportunity for changing the setting every once in a while.

Alternative Solutions

If space is an issue, or if you’re simply a fan of space management, retractable study tables would be a great idea. These desks are readily available at most department stores and are fairly easy to install. When the homework is done, the desk goes back into the wall — or wherever you installed it.

For the tiny one who’s new to school and doesn’t have a desk yet, a kiddie table can make for a cute study area. You can create an engaging environment by incorporating a lot of colors and shapes. Consider adorning the little table with a handful of educational toys such as an abacus. 

Whichever study zone idea you go for, you can make it all the more special by having your youngsters add their own touch. After all, it's their homework area, not yours.