Making room
We live in a giant 2 bedroom condo. In city terms it’s huge. In suburban terms, not so much. One friend recently told me that someone asked her where we planned to move in order to make room for the baby.
There are many pieces of planning that involve making room. Not just physical, but mental, spiritual, psychological, professional…I’ll write more about some of these later.
For now, our current focus is on the physical. We’re not exactly doing a nursery for this one. If anything we’re doing the garage & spare room office space. We figure that once the baby is a decent sleeper, Zora will be getting a roommate. Yes, I know that could take awhile. The garage us about four things: getting rid of stuff, sorting baby stuff, making room for a freezer so we have room for milk storage, and, last but not least, being able to park in the garage to reduce the chances of giant pregnant me falling on the ice in January. Also, it was just embarrassingly filled up.
We thought about redoing the spare room as a nursery. But then we realized that we want that room to still be the office space once the newest one moves in with Zora, plus it would have to do double duty even with a baby in residence, and fir the first few months, we’ll be using a bassinett in our room anyway.
It dawned on us that it would be a waste to plan a full-on nursery only to redo it as an office within a year. So we’re redoing the office with the goal of creating a pleasant office into which we can fit a crib (probably set into its own corner with floor to ceiling curtains creating kind of a canopy bed effect) and a big comfy nursing chair.
Erik wanted gray walls which apparently are a favorite for design types (it started the same blah off-white as the rest of the place, and smudge-prone matte as well). I wanted less stuff (physical and emotional room for the baby). We both love the Shakespeare posters from Yann Legendre, even if they are a bit topically mature for a baby.
Truth be told we’ve had the gray paint in the garage for months. And, those who know us well can confirm that our spare bedrooms have always held the well-deserved nickname “the scary room” (seriously, imagine the worst and that’s pretty much accurate…I was too embarrassed to take a before picture.) Fo give you some idea, though, the first picture is the stuff in crates in the hall that we moved out after I took out everything that didn’t belong. Obviously, some sorting still needs to happen.
On Friday, I cleaned out everything in the scary room that belonged in other rooms in the house. Then, on Saturday, my superlatively wonderful parents came out to help with the clearing of the garage (another horrific home organization story) and offered to paint the room. They painted it in under 4 hours, a skill they attribute to years of marriage & frequent moving.
The second through fourth pictures are the room as it is this afternoon.
And now I am going to work miracles (it is Sunday, after all) and get the crates in the hall sorted and whip this room into shape. Meanwhile Erik is hard at work finishing the garage. (obviously, Zora is not here or as we would never plan on this level of productivity…another gift from my parents was to take her home with them last night.)
And then we’ll have a few months to find the comfy chair, stow the futon in the garage, get the crib up, make crib linens (planning on bold graphic black& white to match this space & Zora’s room), rig up the curtains to surround the crib (gray velvet would be awesome with the walls, I think).
I think I’m officially in the nesting stage.
I love those posters too, and hey, baby won’t know what they are until s-he is much much older. The colors are perfect for a young child, though, they love vibrant colors.
6 September 2010 at 1:40 am