Monday, August 11, 2008

Make room for baby


We live in a two bedroom condo that currently fits us just fine, but we know that there will one day be another tiny person we need to share our space with, so we've got to make some room. Currently we use our second bedroom as a guest room, a TV room, and a storage room. We have to turn it into a nursery, which means most of that stuff has to come out, either by getting rid of it or moving it to another room. For the most part we are putting this off until we are actually pregnant, but in the past couple of weeks we have been making major progress.

A couple of weeks ago, on a whim, we went to Ikea and bought the desk we've always wanted - a secretary style (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10115213) with a hutch (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/30115212) - and put it in our living room. It replaced a mostly decorative bookshelf, which someone from our condo is coming to pick up tonight. We also bought a file cabinet bench that replaced a coffee table (also from Ikea). This allowed us to move our computer equipment and supplies, office supplies, filing cabinet all out of the study. Now the living room is much more elegant that before, and more useful.

Last week was K's 29th birthday, and I got her CD booklets (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005ATMF) to hold all 400+ of our CDs so that we could get rid of the CD cases. This freed up a lot of space in our entertainment center, so we moved all of our DVDs from the storage ottomans to the entertainment center, and all of our electronics (extension cords, camera equipment, batteries, etc) from the bedroom closet to the entertainment center. Then we moved our tablecloths and blankets from the linen closet to the storage ottomans, and some storage boxes from the bedroom closet to the linen closet.

Then, viola! We have 1.5 empty shelves in the bedroom closet and all of the floor space. It's starting to feel like this will actually work! We moved the coffee table into the now empty closet floor space to be used as a toy chest, though right now it's still full of photo albums that will eventually need to find a new home. We really like living in a small home, but it presents a space challenge. But for the most part, we like the challenge. All of our furniture serves a purpose and there is no place in our home we don't use. And we don't keep things we don't need.

The next plan, but one we have to save more money for, is to buy a bed frame with drawers for our bedroom to move some of the stuff into our room. And to buy a flatscreen TV to move the TV out of the second bedroom and into the living room. And to do a major purge - getting rid of more things we don't need. K's been looking forward to that part for years - getting rid of stuff is her favorite activity. But all of this can wait until we have more money, energy, or need. Right now we are just happy with the progress we've made so far.

We tackled other home improvement projects this weekend as well. We bought a digital converter for our television and went from having 3 fuzzy channels to having 21 crisp channels. The picture is so clear it's like we have cable again. We stayed up late Saturday night watching travel shows on PBS and The Chapelle Show on the CW, both channels we couldn't get before. All for just $23 after the government coupon. Why did we wait this long?

Also we tried to replace our dining room light with a paper lantern that better matches our Asian themed dining room, but we got confused and quit midway through and called our friend A for help. She hasn't come by yet, so basically the cords are hanging from the ceiling. So that was our only failure this weekend. Hopefully we can get that one fixed soon. But all in all it was a very good, very productive, weekend.

No comments: