...to continue to the tour

...a small space filled with lots of stuff.

Our upstairs has four bedrooms and a bath with a wide hallway between them  I wanted to make the hallway a useable place for the kids; it has become a reading/work area for them.

Remember how the toy room was spilling into the hallway...not anymore.

This was another fun treasure I found at a thrift shop...an old library cart.  I might have painted it but I love the inscription on the bottom of the cart and didn't want to cover this up.

We hung the calendar (slightly out-of-reach-on-purpose) above the cart.  Abbey has fun changing the weather and date and she remembers to do this most every day.

Toy room to the left...bath to the right.

The bookshelf at the end between Will and Isabella's room.  This was a challenge too...

I organized all of the markers, crayons, drawing pencils, scissors (it is sinful how many pairs I have found), glue (ditto), erasers (yes a whole bucket dedicated to them), into buckets I picked up at target.  Then I labeled them.  Because thankfully my kids have learned to at least follow written directions!  And you could never put a marker in the crayon bucket!

Then I organized the books.  As you can tell children's books are an obsession of mine.

I sorted the books and put them on the shelf by genre, series, and age.  Those are the stacks that you see...in between the stacks are different series that we don't have as many books of.  I even put some of the series in the back.  There was plenty of room.

On the middle shelf you see some smaller boxes.  I have always struggled with how to organize all of the paperback books that mostly come from scholastic book orders.  I found these small boxes (and had intended to cover them with contact paper) to sort our books.  Will has a box of 'boy' books.  These are titles like spiderman, poke man, and Scooby-Doo.  One box is filled with Berenstain Bear books.  Another has the leveled learn-to-read books, and finally one box is filled with non-fiction titles.  On the bottom is work books and titles that didn't really have a spot on the library cart or in the toy room.

The mice have earned a spot of honor in the house this time (as opposed to a life of shame on the third floor in our last house).  They gets lots of attention here at the top of the stairs.

The baskets hold scrap drawing papers for the little girls and notebooks.  The bottom basket (made from magazine papers) is for our library books.  Here's to hoping we don't lose any for a while!

Finally the workspace.  Look at this cutie.  Still in his PJ's but sportin' a new hair cut.  He set his desk up extra-special for himself today to do his homework.  Over a week's worth.  That's how long he has been out of school fighting his strep and pneumonia infections.  He looks as if he is finally beginning to perk up!