Surfaces

We live in a small house. I love my little house and have no desire to move to a bigger place. If I had the room there are two things I would love to have in my house, an upright piano and a second table. The piano I can live without, I do have a good electric piano that lives on the upstairs landing it goes without saying that is not the same as a real piano, but it will do. The second table is harder to live without. Our dining room table gets used for eating and just about everything else, it is a surface for games, jigsaws, crafting, drawing, painting, a science lab and every time we need to eat it has to be cleared. I have lost count of the number of times that I have had to say no to the children wanting to do something on the table because a meal is about to be served. But how to fit another table into our house. The table needs to be downstairs as that is where the children want to be when they do stuff, my youngest has a desk in her room which I am sure she will use when she is much older and one day my eldest may ask for one in his room.

We have a small desk, well surface rather than desk, in the corner of the dining room which houses our PC, a filing tray for each of us to store stuff and most of our household paperwork is stored on shelves above. The desk is not big enough to work at and there is only space for one.

We have been pondering this dilemma for a while until we hit on a table attached to the wall that you could fold away. We had room for this in the dining room. We have talked about making it on and off for the past year. Then I started reading this book this week and knew that another table was an important addition to our household and something that we needed to stop talking about and actually make. So we did, well my husband made it with consultations along the way, and twenty fours hours later we had a second table! It doesn't look like much but it has been used so much in the last week, this may if course be the novelty factor, but I am rather hoping the novelty doesn't wear off and it gets used a lot forever. The pots on the window sill contain pencils, pens, scissors, glue etc easily accessible. Although the table can be folded down, it is hinged, I can see that this may not happen that often…

Spurred on by our making and organising we tackled another part of the same room which had been bugging me for ages. As you come into the dining room if you are not careful you can crack your ankle on a conveniently placed wooden box which houses the library books and magazines. This box was originally made to hold kindling and newspaper for our fire, we now have purpose built shelves for them, so the box is on a second life as storage. My children always borrow a truck full of books every week so often the box is not big enough and the books end up strewn all over the house which elicits much tutting from me as I attempt to find them all to return. So tentatively made a suggestion to my husband when the table was finished. Of course, let me see what wood I've got. I nearly fell off my chair! So much sawing, sanding, buffing and drilling later we now have four shelves. One for magazines and three for library books. Perhaps it is a little decadent to have shelves just for library books, especially when our shelves for our own books are bursting at the seams, but library books have an important place in a home educating house, as I am sure they do in any other, and I needed to be able to easily find them come return day.