The portal potty that has been on my front lawn since MAY of 2024 has finally been picked up. This is very exciting as it means our home renovations adding an extension on to our house and re-building the staircase are done. DONE! Renovating while homeschooling has been an experience, let me tell you. In this post I share how I made homeschooling work during home remodeling.
We had to move out of our home for 5 months of these renovations. And then we had to live and homeschool in the midst of total mess and chaos. Honestly, looking back I’m not sure how we did it – but every day we just found a spot to learn and did our best. Some days we homeschooled at a favourite breakfast restaurant while eating chocolate chip pancakes. Some days we were confined to the kids bedrooms – all squished in with the dog, eating muffins and snacks for lunch.
I’ve gotten so used to constant interruptions to our homeschool day, I’m not even sure what it will be like to not have the doorbell ringing or my contractor calling to ask questions.
I thought I’d write a post of what I learned through this season. What worked, what didn’t, and any general advice I have for any family about to undertake homeschooling in the midst of renovation chaos.
1. Let go of perfection and embrace flexibility
Did we do everything I hoped to do? No. Not even close. We dropped a lot of our school subjects -focusing on the minimums: Math, Reading, Writing, Science, and History. Instead of having a full feast of homeschool subjects, we worked on flexibility and focus despite hammering, drilling, and sawing. Sometimes, we just left the house and did our school work at the library or a restaurant.
Being flexible also meant thinking outside of the box for how we approached our homeschool curriculums. Anything can be a math manipulative. You can play a board game with just a piece of paper and a deck of cards.
2. Be mobile
When I organized our homeschool supplies this year, each kid had a banker box with their school books and things. I also had a banker box of the family homeschool things. This way, I could move the boxes to wherever we were homeschooling. For a bit, we rented a house around the corner from our house. Then, we stayed at an Airbnb for a few weeks. Then I shrunk our banker boxes even further into a carry-on suitcase and we headed to Canada for a month to stay with my in-laws and homeschool from their home.
We are book-intense in our homeschool and so I used wooden crates to store our books at our various living situations. I could stack them as almost a temporary book shelf. It was easy to move our books around this way and organize them in a way the kids could access them no matter where we were living.
3. Know that everything, and I mean everything will get covered in dust.
It seems like a lot of work to box everything up in rooms that aren’t being touched in the renovation and your General Contractor might tell you, “I will protect this room with a plastic sheeting, everything can stay as is, don’t worry”. But the reality is, the people doing the work don’t know the general contractor promised you plastic sheeting on your sofas (he forgot to tell them) and they will demolish a nearby wall without thinking about all the dust flying everywhere. And honestly? Plastic sheeting doesn’t do much to stop drywall dust. It just gets everywhere. Assume everything will get covered in dust and box it or cover it yourself. It is so much less work than cleaning it up afterwards.
4. Get out of the house
Renovations are noisy, dirty, chaotic, and full of interruptions. Even when we were living around the corner in our temporary house, things felt out of sync. We were comfortable, but we weren’t home. It was nice to get out and do things. Homeschooling on-the-go meant learning out in the world. We went the playground, the library, the Children’s Discovery Museum, the zoo. We went bowling, skating, and swimming. We took road trips down to Los Angeles and Palm Springs, we took day trips to Sonoma, Alameda, and San Francisco.
5. Get out into nature
Nature is grounding, it is peaceful. There are no drills or saws, there is no hubbub. While the natural world is constantly changing in small ways, it is far more gradual than the abrupt destruction of a home renovation. Spending time being still and slow in the fresh air is very helpful to everyone’s mental health.
6. Drop things
To everything there is a season, and my season of touching a billion objects and making a million decisions was not a season I could post consistently on this blog or do my usual volunteer commitments. I had to simplify and carve out time for myself to make all the choices and do all the manual labor involved in getting a home through a renovation – moving, cleaning, moving again, cleaning, moving back into our home and cleaning….LOL. Like I said, the year of a billion objects.
7. Create something beautiful for your home
It was hard to watch my home being torn apart and parts of it demolished to make way for the new. I was excited about the renovation at its completion stage, but it was oddly emotional for me to be in the in-between phase. One thing that saved my sanity in this phase was to work on a quilt for my soon-to-be-new-and-improved TV room. I didn’t bring much of my things to the temporary house, but I didn’t want to be on my phone all the time – so I decided to bring my sewing machine and a bag of scraps I got at a garage sale and work on sewing these scraps into a quilt. It felt good to slowly stitch together something beautiful that I had control over. In this period, my daughter and I sewed a lot together – and it is one of my fondest memories of our time living at the temporary house.
Now to finish it! That’s a project for 2026.
8. Batch cook, heat & serve.
My kids love to eat pumpkin bread for breakfast. One thing that saved my sanity during this renovation was baking a ton of calorie-dense and healthy baked goods that I could easily give the kids on chaotic mornings when I just couldn’t be in the kitchen. I typically do cook a lot of our meals from scratch, but in this season – we were in our heat and serve chicken dino nuggets/frozen pizza/canned soup era. Batch cooking when I could and embracing convenience foods was just what had to happen when half of my kitchen tools and most of my spices were packed away.
9. Make functional spaces for your kids first
When we moved back into our home from our temporary living – our renovations were far from finished. We had to rebuild a portion of our Ikea kitchen. Most of our furniture and boxes were in a pod on our front lawn, or crammed into our son’s bedroom. We arrived home at 10 pm on New Years’ Eve from a month at my in-laws in Canada and we rang in the New Year building the kids’ beds. My first priority when moving back in was making a functional cozy space for my kids in their bedrooms where we could homeschool in the days ahead when the main floor of our home (and the staircase!) was still far from finished. Fortunately my kids bedrooms are connected by a Jack and Jill bathroom suite. This meant we could close their bedroom doors, and move between the two rooms through the bathroom. That bathroom became a make-shift kitchen for a couple weeks while we tried to stay out of the way as they built and re-built the bannister for the staircase 4 times.
10. Remember – everything is a learning opportunity
One of my favourite Charlotte Mason quotes is, “We learn for life, not for the schools”, meaning the goal is to be life-long learners, not just to get a good grade in a specific academic subject and then promptly forget it all. There is learning everywhere in life. Did we have a fantastic year of science education and fun, successful science experiments? No. But we did learn how to pivot, how to be flexible, how to stay focused amidst loud noise. We learned how to sew, how to build legos, how to build IKEA furniture, how to observe nature, how to choose paint colours, how to play card games. We traveled, visited museums, and went to a quartz countertop bone yard to choose bathroom vanity tops. We went to carpet stores and paint stores and tile stores. We read novels together, we watched documentaries and educational Youtube channels, we played at friends’ houses.
I’m so glad to finally be done. Yesterday, we got new sod put in the backyard. We have some trees ready to be planted. And my mum-in-law is arriving in a couple of weeks to help me do some more planting in the backyard and bring it back from a dirt pit! To complement our gardening era – the kids and I are finding inspiration reading The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. We learn for life, after all.
Chaotically yours,
-Heather
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Enjoyed this post? Please check out some of my other posts!
- Making Homeschooling Work During Home Remodeling
- Why Halloween is Important for Kids
- Kids Books about Trustworthiness
- Having a Pet Hamster for Families
- Kids Books About Compassion
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