Homeschooling while selling a house
The latest challenge for our family has been how to continue homeschooling while attempting to sell our house! By nature, having 5 kids at home during the day means there is a lot more mess than would otherwise be the case. My husband likes a tidy house (as do I), so we have always tried to keep things as orderly as possible anyway, but putting your house on the market takes things to a whole new level!
We started by taking everything down off the walls, apart from a handful of the kids’ pictures. The wad of blu-tack I ended up with was probably the size of a tennis ball! I thought I was being clever by sticking their checklists and basic facts score sheets to the inside of their desks, but pretty soon we decided they needed to go too. So now each of the kids just has a pencil case (tucked away in a cupboard), their homeschooling box, and a choice of using the dining table, the kitchen bench or the floor! Even our mini table and chairs were shipped off to the extended family.
Because we never knew when a real estate agent would want to bring someone through the house, we had to keep everything tidy all the time. This was a great incentive for finally teaching the kids to make their beds properly!! Every day we held a bed-making competition, and even our 3.5 year old has become fairly competent at it!
We were able to keep mornings for homeschooling, and limit buyer appointments to the afternoons. This meant we could still get a reasonable amount of work done, and use the afternoon for visiting the shops or the playground. The kids have become slightly better at cleaning up after themselves too – although I’m doubtful whether this will last! We had to up the ante on vacuuming and dusting, so the kids gained a few extra jobs which they weren’t ecstatic about! Reminding them why we were working so hard and keeping them excited about the end goal seemed to help though.
Selling a house is never easy, and definitely not something I’d want to drag out for a long period of time! But it has been manageable, and the kids’ education hasn’t suffered too much.. in fact if anything it has been an opportunity for them to learn a bit about the house buying and selling process, and to become a bit more self-driven in their school work!
