Blog

Pivoting as a Parent this School Year

If you have kids that are still in school, you’re probably experiencing the uncertain and undulating roadmap of the future of education. With COVID-19 rearranging our schedules, altering our abilities, and whereabouts, one industry that has perhaps suffered the most is education. Toddlers in preschool, middle schoolers, high school students, and university scholars alike have all experienced a trying year, a crash-course in pivoting. Learning how to adapt to shifting circumstances has not been easy, and as we look ahead to brighter days, we also must address the current educational climate, now in October. The percentage of schools open to in-house teaching is only a small percentage, peppered throughout the country, while most education is being taught online from home.
For states that experience drastic weather changes during the winter months, such as the East Coast and Midwest, it will not be possible to hold classes outside, as was the solution starting this fall school year. With flu season nearing and temperatures dropping, we may start to see a greater push for at-home learning. For those educational institutions choosing to continue classes indoors, new spatial solutions will be an absolute necessity for safeguarding all students and faculty against the virus.

Working from Home

If you’ve recently been asked to bring learning home after your children have already started this school year in a real school setting, the transition can be cumbersome. Home doesn’t exactly emulate the same classroom setting, often making it difficult for students to focus and keep on top of their coursework. Especially for children who are used to having their own special space in a classroom, their own desk, as well as a physical instructor and teacher aids helping guide their learning process, homeschooling can be a huge challenge. With so many external factors contributing to their inability to focus like other siblings, pets, and toys, it’s no wonder this has been a trying time for so many. If you’re like most parents, you’re probably wondering how you can set your child up for success for the rest of the school year. After all, if we’ve learned anything from 2020 it’s that the future is a complete mystery- with no known timeline of this virus to help aid our decisions.

What We Can Do

One of the quickest and swiftest decisions you can make for your child’s learning process from home is to provide them an educational sanctuary within your home. Most of us don’t have an extra bedroom available to make a classroom come to life seamlessly, however, there are other reasonable solutions. You can easily and affordably construct a home office/classroom within an open space by using Sliding Glass Wall Partitions. Glass partitions are easy to install and remove, affording you the flexibility you need during these uncertain times. Next month everything could change, and the kids could be back in school, and that’s why it’s important to come up with malleable solutions that don’t break the bank! Floor-to-ceiling glass wall dividers can be constructed within a matter of hours and your little ones can enjoy the extra privacy and focus they need to succeed this school year. Choose from varying glass opacities to achieve your desired level of privacy- from completely transparent, to opaque, you have tons of options for customization.

Get Them Active!

If your children have recently returned home to do remote learning, one of the best ways to ensure a productive, less-stress day is to get them outside often. If you can, encourage them to take small breaks every few hours so that they can get up and walk around and take in the fresh air while burning some of that pent-up energy! Too much stagnant energy can certainly keep children of any age from focusing. Go on a walk together, ride bikes, or encourage them to make up their own games in the backyard. During a normal school day, they would have lots of time to play with other kids, run around the schoolyard, engage in P.E. or after-school sports. It’s important to make sure that they still get this activity time!

Give you and your kids the gift of calm this fall with awesome space optimizing solutions offered at The Sliding Door Company. Hop online and check out our viewing catalog of Sliding Glass Room Dividers, beautiful Sliding Glass Barn Doors, and more! Schedule a free initial consultation with one of our knowledgeable experts to get started on your exciting project today. Don’t wait until your kid’s grades start dropping to call the space experts today!

TSDC 1029 – A

Blog

Interior Space Mastery How Colors Inform Emotions Within Our Home

We’ve all experienced that moment walking into a home and becoming instantly transfixed, transported to another time and place and feeling. The colors on the walls, the textiles, the shapes of furniture inform our emotions, and cause us to feel a specific kind of way. That savory experience might have motivated some of us to seek out a similar experience in our own homes. Those experiences leave us wondering what exactly about that space had such a profound effect on our emotional state. Perhaps the mixture of all of the intimately considered design details when melded together, successfully elevated the space and brought us into a new state of being. So how does color inform emotion and what color palette can you choose to feel a specific way in your home?

Color Theory

Interior designers and artists across the globe have long asserted that color informs and influences human mood and emotion. The careful consideration of color within a space can have a profound effect on the psychological happenings of the inhabitant. From anxiety to depression, calmness to concentration, the color pallet can have a substantial impact on real human emotion. That’s why picking wall paint, furniture, and art while often overlooked, can literally change your life. People often admit to being turned off by a room if it doesn’t feel inviting. Not quite able to put their finger on the problem, many end up neglecting certain rooms in the house simply due to a bad color choice. That’s why we’re here to help inform your color decisions moving forward and hopefully ensure every room in the home is being used and loved by everyone.
“Color is a powerful communication tool and can be used to signal action, influence mood, and even influence physiological reactions. Certain colors have been associated with increased blood pressure, increased metabolism, and eyestrain.” -Kendra Cherry, VeryWellMind.com

The Basics: Warm vs. Cool 

Warm tones include colors under the red category, such a red, orange, yellow, and some creams, and whites. These colors can cause us to feel an array of different emotions. Take the color red for example, which is considered the most extreme color of them all. Red can cause us to feel many different emotions, all of which are intense and moving. Anger, love, excitement, passion, power, and control are all possible emotional byproducts of red, depending on the shade, the context, and our own unique associative processing. Yet other colors under the warm category such as orange, yellow, and creams can influence us to feel comfort, love, security, happiness, excitement, and motivation.
Examining colors on the cool spectrum, such as blues, purples, greens, and whites, we can often experience a different side of emotions. Feeling calm, relaxed, soothed, and concentrated in cooler settings has been reported by many. Although research is relatively limited, many of us can relate to these findings. So, when planning your interiors, consider how you may want to feel within each space. For example, home offices should maybe have a cooler wall color like blue, green, or white to improve concentration and focus while remaining calm and relaxed.
Other Considerations

  • Lighting

Lighting feeds greatly into mood and emotion in interior spaces. Natural light, warm amber bulbs, and light-allowing glass will help to accentuate the space and elevate mood. Consider replacing normal walls with sliding glass walls and floor to ceiling sliding glass dividers to allow natural daytime light to flow through your interior spaces.

  • Art

Pair thought-provoking art with your relative wall color to offer beautiful juxtapositions and influence your emotion in the space. If your wall color is simpler and paired-down, you’ll have more freedom to play with colorful pieces without running the risk of over-stimulation.

  • Furniture

Furnishings have an obvious effect on space, as does their color. The color pallet of the entire room needs to be considered and has to work harmoniously with the wall color, art, and textiles. Patterns and color can either elevate or distract. Make sure your furniture is
Keep these color considerations in mind when designing your interiors. When chasing that feeling of being transported to another time and place, color and light is key. Bring more light into your home with glass wall dividers and space-optimizing sliding glass doors, sliding closet doors, and sliding room dividers. For more inspiration and ideas on spatial solutions, don’t hesitate to check out the best offered at The Sliding Door Company. Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your vision today!

TSDC 1020 – A

Blog

Homeschooling Solutions for the fall

Being just a few weeks away from the start of the new school year, parents, teachers, and students are looking ahead to a new kind of education, from home. While many children already experienced this “new normal” this past Spring, this kind of learning takes some getting used to. Schooling from home can be incredibly difficult for children- impacting their social life, attention span, quality of instruction, and their physical wellbeing. The value of going to school has never been more overstated than now, after seeing the effects of homeschooling for months on end, we can all collectively appreciate what institutions of education have to offer.

Not just impacting students, this schooling-from-home has been a crippling experience for most parents and teachers. Teachers being asked to guide an entire class of students in online instruction every day has been stressful, challenging and has presented many real issues, such as altered lesson plans, virtual dependency, and a total lack of hands-on instruction. Not being able to connect with their students personally, teachers feel stunted and out of touch, especially at lower grade levels when personalization is so important to a child’s educational success.

For many parents, this homeschooling experience has been difficult for a litany of reasons. First, for parents who are still working from home, the disruption and distraction of children in and around their workspace and relative working environment make an already strenuous task even harder. Losing the ability to focus and stay on task, parents are experiencing diminished patience and increased stress and anxiety while working from home. Most parents are now wearing multiple hats, such as a teacher, a parent, a cook, and a nanny, all throughout their workday. With the normal school day and after-school sports aligning well with the hours of the normal workday, parents used to enjoy free childcare during their important working hours and had time to focus on their job. Now that has all changed and everyone has been asked to fill in the gaps.

room divider 3 door frame glass home office residential

Create A Classroom From Home

Think about setting your child up with a classroom-like setting that will lend itself to the child’s imagination and provide a little safe space for your student to sink into schoolwork without the distractions of home. Install Glass Wall Dividers into an open floor plan that will help to enclose the classroom area and create a physical barrier between home life and school time for your child. Making these distinctions will help improve focus, offer a place to stow all of their supplies and desk, and allow them to feel considered in their homeschooling journey.

New Rules For the New Normal       

Working from home doesn’t just apply to children these days! If you find yourself still working from home after all these months, know that you’re not alone. Millions of Americans are still working from home and still having difficulty juggling all of the “extras” of home life. Though this is a trying time, luckily, there are a few helpful strategies to help prepare you to continue life from home with some new structure and boundaries.

To start, here is a shortlist of some of the most helpful tips for working from home:

  • Maintain Regular Hours. Set a schedule, and stick to it as best you can
  • Create a Morning Routine That Helps You Relax and Prepare for a Full Day.
  • Set Ground Rules with the People in Your Space (Children, Roommates and Partner).
  • Schedule Regular Breaks to Get Up and Stretch.
  • Walk Outside Every Few Hours to Get Necessary Vitamin D and Fresh Air.
  • Take Breaks in Their Entirety.
  • Don’t Hesitate to Ask for What You Need.
  • Keep a Dedicated Office Space.

Perhaps one of the most important tips on that list was the last one, Keep A Dedicated Office Space.

While most homes are not equipped with a home office or an extra bedroom, there are spatial solutions you can integrate/install into your home to achieve that physical separation you require for a productive workday from home. While juggling children, work, and your own mental and physical health can be super difficult. These solutions will help create the boundaries you need for a successful day during life during COVID.

Office Partitions

Without a separate bedroom or an office in your home, it can be daunting to get work done from your couch or dining table while your family or roommates exist nearby. Consider installing Glass Office Partitions or sliding room dividers within an open area that doesn’t get much foot traffic. Little corners of the living room or the garage could function well for this. Order your very own sleek and modern glass wall partitions from The Sliding Door Company, and customize everything about them, from handles and accessories to their opacity and style. All available to order online, you can personalize your new office walls with the click of a button, from the comfort of home. By constructing a home office, you can create a sanctuary for yourself during the workday that children and family members know not to enter or bother you in.

Pretend Like You Are Still Going Into The Office

For some reason, when we think we’re going into the physical office, we take our work and ourselves more seriously. Consider getting up earlier than usual, taking the dog on a walk before starting work, dressing well even though you’ll be working from home, and making a pot of coffee first thing in the morning. These little routines will help get you in that headspace of productivity and feel like everything is business as usual, however far from reality that may be.

By providing the design considerations of the modern-day and melding them with consideration for the natural world, you step into the realm of breathtaking modern architecture. Assert your business as forward-thinking, eco-conscious, and highly modern, and watch your company thrive! For more inspiration and spatial solutions, don’t hesitate to check out the best space-optimizing sliding glass doors, Sliding Closet Doors, and sliding room dividers offered at The Sliding Door Company. Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your vision today!

TSDC 1014

Blog

What You Might Love About Working From Home and the Benefits

As we begin to return to a sense of normalcy within the work world, as well as within our daily routines, many of us are beginning to question the need to return to the standard “office”. After jumping through the initial hoops of quarantine, and relearning how to craft our own daily schedules, many of us still holding jobs came to find that working from home wasn’t so bad after all. This self-isolation bred many unexpected benefits, such as increased time with friends and family, the ability to choose our working hours, and the chance to fit in more physical exercise and outdoor time. These silver linings of the once dreaded WFH mandate not only granted us access to a more well-rounded day, but it also forced us to look at our relative environmental impact, and how our work week contributed heavily to our annual carbon footprint.

Now that our economy is beginning to reopen, and our options are broadening, we begin to question if returning to the way things were is a good idea. If undertaking the daily commute and eight-hour office day was working for us, or if it’s actually stunting our potential to grow as individuals, taxing the natural environment, and straining our personal relationships. Making the move to work from home as a more permanent, or part-time solution is inherently a much greener, sustainable option as compared with working “in house”. If unsure how working from home could lead to a greener lifestyle, we’re about to unpack the truth of existing in the 9-5 work world.

Commute Guilt

Have you ever experienced commute guilt? That is, the sinking feeling whilst sitting in stop and go traffic, with the overwhelming feeling that you might be contributing to the problem. Not just the problem of peak commute traffic, but the overarching environmental problem. Well, you’re not alone. Most commuters share similar distress, and for good reason. Traffic, idling vehicles and too many single-passenger cars on the road contribute heavily to harmful CO2 emissions each and every day. Vehicle exhaust not only pollutes our atmosphere and decreases air quality, but it also slowly depletes the ozone layer which keeps our planet cool and our atmospheric temperature stable. By making the conscious decision to either take available public transportation, ride a bike to work, carpool or to scrap the commute altogether, you’ll significantly slash your annual carbon footprint. Working from home is the best way to become a low-impact human.

Will That Be For Here or To Go?

Ever noticed how much excess packaging goes into take-out food? An enormous amount of single-use plastic packaging is used each and every day from the working class who eat out on their lunchtime break. Ordering food to go is understandably a necessity during a thirty-minute lunch break to afford you the time, convenience, and taste you desire during a grueling workweek. And while this solution is practical, it is the least environmentally friendly option for consumption. When you choose to work from home, chances are you’ll be more inclined to make your own lunch, cook home meals, and use a coffee mug rather and washable utensils. Compare this with styrofoam containers, plastic utensils and straws, throw away plastic or paper coffee cups (which almost always have a plastic lid), and the effects of that waste are obvious. Of course, you could always pack your own lunch, bring a reusable coffee cup, and do your best to only buy from restaurants who use paper packaging and have an eco-conscious business model, but chances are, those options are few and far between.

Commercial Resources

Something we don’t often consider regarding our places of work is the number of resources large commercial buildings suck up in order to maintain a healthy and comfortable working environment for its inhabitants. Take air conditioning and heating, for example. The amount of electricity and chemicals product needed to power a large-scale HVAC system have a profound effect on our natural environment. These units are often energy guzzlers, left running all the time, and are not using alternative energy sources to power them. When you work from home, you can better control your A/C and heat usage, the amount of lighting (typically offices need more intense lighting due to a limited supply of natural light), and other high-impact resources.

So What Can I Do?

If you feel called to work freelance or split your week between in-office and at-home days, there are some helpful spatial solutions you can integrate into your home to craft an ideal home office that will afford you space, concentration, and the separation you need for a successful workday. First, consider integrating glass room dividers into a corner of your home that happens to have extra unused space. These handy and easy-to-construct glass wall partitions and sliding room dividers are breezy to install and help to retain a stylish aesthetic to compliment your thoughtful interiors. Sliding glass barn doors are another fantastic spatial solution, and a simple way to create separation between two distinct spaces. Glass barn doors have that beautiful modern-contemporary look while still paying homage to a rustic classic. These no-construction-needed glass walls integrate flawlessly into any home and provide real walls for your desired home office!

With all of the added benefits of being your own boss, creating your own work schedule, and making your workday work for you, you can feel good about your morning commute being from your bedroom to the kitchen, and from the kitchen right into to your new home office. No waste, no guilt. Instantly increase your clean karma with a WFH solution. For more inspiration and space optimizing solutions, don’t hesitate to check out the best sliding closet doors, tri fold dividers, sliding room dividers, and spatial solutions offered at The Sliding Door Company. Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your vision today!