Two weekends ago I promised Amanda that I’d move some rooms around today. I was awake before my two girls, so I decided to go ahead and get started by clearing away some stuff in my office and the guestroom, as the plan was to switch the two. Here’s the short version:
Plan 1: Switch the office and the guestroom.
Plan 2: Combine the office and the guestroom in the current office and move Milly into the current guestroom.
Plan 3: Leave Milly in her room, clean up the guestroom, rearrange the office.
This all came, of course, over the course of several hours. The first thing Amanda and I decided to do was to rearrange the office in a way that could accommodate the extra furniture that the guestroom would bring with it. That mainly entailed moving the desk from facing out into the room to against the wall opposite the door, moving the filing cabinet from the guestroom closet to the corner of the office and sliding the second desk over to make an L, then moving the thing with the cubby-like shelves. Amanda wanted to move it to the current guestroom when we were going to make that Milly’s room, but now it’s just against a wall in the office still. I prefer that anyway, because it gives me a place to put stuff. Yeah, some of it is stuff I could probably toss out, but a lot of it is stuff like printer paper and the like.
The office does look much better. It’s much more open now. I had it set up the other way before for when Milly was little, so I could easily keep an eye on her. She doesn’t need nearly as much close watching now though.
We also got rid of an old TV, which had been sitting in the guestroom closet on top of the filing cabinet. I think it’s the one Antonio Balayan gave me years ago. It works fine, but it’s bulky and small and standard definition, so we didn’t really need it. I put it in Karen’s van when she left so she could take it to the community ministry. I don’t know if anyone would pay for a TV like that anymore though.
The first thing that got us to change our plans was that Amanda’s mom called and said she could bring a bed that she bought for Milly. I should explain this bed. It’s a bunk bed frame, more of a loft, I suppose, made to look like a house. It’s pretty freaking awesome. She bought it for $75 from the community ministry where she helps out, but I think she or Amanda or someone found online that it retailed for something like $1300.
We weren’t fully decided as to whether it would fit in the guestroom or not, but Amanda did want to try to save us the trouble of having to move it at a later time (like if we have a second kid and want to put them in Milly’s current room).
I also figured out, after measuring and marking off the area, that I’d have very little room to move around in a chair if we put a bed in the office, which was my biggest reason for keeping the status quo. We did decide to take Harvey’s crate apart though, which freed up a lot of room and let us pull the elliptical out of the corner. It also confused Harvey when it came time to feed him later.
Anyway, Karen arrived as I was still cleaning up my desk. We unloaded the many pieces of bed with Milly helping by carrying some of the small pieces upstairs. I don’t remember what time it was exactly, but we spent until some time in the 7:00 hour putting that thing together without instructions. The fun part was that there were some parts we got mostly together then had to take apart when we realized that something else had to go in place first. Then the facade, the large house-shaped part with some window cutouts, slid off at one point, damaging the corner and the wall. It was a huge pain in the ass. I’m glad that a) both Karen and Amanda were there because there were times when we definitely needed three people and b) we didn’t do this Monday like we originally planned.
I guess it was all worth it though, because Milly was super excited. We put her toddler bed in the place where the bottom bed goes (we don’t have a bed for that area anyway) and we don’t have a mattress for the loft part yet, though we wouldn’t let her sleep up there anyway. She can’t really get herself up to the top (yet), so we’re not too worried about that.
It is a cool bed. It’s got a bookshelf in the front and behind there there’a an area she can crawl into and below that is a toybox. Of course, she loved being in the top part the most. Yeah, she definitely liked it. It’s the first time she slept in anything other than the cardboard house since she got that.
Milly’s room is almost too cool. She’s got hand-drawn and -painted Dr. Seuss walls, a cardboard house with doors and windows and a bed shaped like a house with places to hide herself away.
It was a beautiful day outside today. We planned to go to the park at some point, but that bed took much longer than expected. Amanda and Milly did get to go for a walk for a little bit though.
Zach Dotsey