Hitting the Big Time

Well, I guess hitting the big time would mean we were booked on Oprah, but for me personally seeing my vision of room swapping come to fruition was pretty huge for me.



After cleaning out my office, Jennifer and Shannon (and especially Michael) would not rest until the whole project was done. So the following Monday we gathered here again, but this time back to "normal" with a house full of kids. I have to say, I like it that way.





We jumped right into dealing with the giant desk in what was my office/closet/hovel. It was too big to fit out the door intact. Jennifer is the most mechanically minded and tool adept, so she took the lead on the desk demo. We had that beast demolished in no time. The fact that we had workers here fixing rotted wood on our deck meant that we were able to add the demolished desk bits to their existing scrap pile headed to the dump. This pile was located conveniently right outside my bedroom window.



Don't throw the baby out with the desk bits!



We relocated my desktop to the upstairs great room, a move I've really enjoyed. The computer is in the middle of the goings-on in the house now, and I am forced to keep my desk clean.

The desk out, we we able to vacuum the office now closet(or rather employ a nearby child to vacuum it), and installed a new shelf with a hanging bar to match the other two in there. We gathered Joe and my clothes and shoes from their previous various locations around the house and viola! we had a closet!













The move also freed up space in other closets! (Funny. Organizing this closet that Stella is in was the very first Cleaning Club project we did at my house. And there we were undoing it.)


With the office relocated, the room swap could happen. Jennifer and Shannon (and Michael) came back on Saturday, while Joe was out of town, and we completed the move. This was no small task. We removed all the doors from their hinges, and moved several big pieces of furniture. Just trying to figure out what order to do things in was enough to make my brain freeze up and I'd have to control, alt, delete and then hard reboot to make it work again.









Things looked stalled for a moment when we couldn't get the couch through the doorway of the old den, but we finally figured out that the legs could be screwed off and there was much rejoicing. And because Cleaning Club encourages doing things right, and Michael won't stand for anything less, we vacuumed every inch of carpet, wiped baseboards as we went, and even sucked out all the crazy stuff that gathered under couch and chair cushions.



It took three hours but the results were so utterly worth it.

My new den.





My new bedroom.





I could have never, ever been able to do this by myself. The fact that my friends seemed almost as excited about this for our family as I was was such a bonus.

Joe came home Sunday night and was blown away. He could not get over the fact that S and J had been willing to put so much effort into the project, and that we'd pulled it all off.

I feel like I'm in someone else's house, or at a fine hotel in my new bedroom. I love that I have a view of the woods now, and there is enough space for my dog to sleep on the floor at the foot of our bed and I don't have to climb over her to get into bed. Our mornings are so much more streamlined, and I think it's especially helped Joe to be able have all his clothes in one place.

The new den works just fine. We'll look for some smaller furniture so it's not so crammed in there, but for now it totally works. Michael kept muttering that the chi was "all whack" and tried to push his Feng Shui ideas on me but I was all, go play with your toes or something! It's going to have to do for now! And he did, cause he's a good baby like that.