Well, we've been here for more than three years (second longest in any one location since high school - woot!), and last weekend I picked up a brochure for one of the houses for sale on my usual walking route **. Not because I plan to move to a house that's only a mile away from my current home, but just because I wanted to look at someplace I could move, if we wanted to. If we wanted to lose money on our current house, pack up everything ourselves for the first time since 1995, pay closing costs and Realtor fees for the first time since 1995, and go through the months-long hassle of changing addresses and phones and all that jazz. Not to mention moving away from the friends we've made on the street, whom we'd see a lot less often if we couldn't just pop down the street when the spirit moved us.
So instead of moving to a new house, Jason and I spent this weekend moving things around in our current house. Same amount of dust and hernia-inducing lifting, fewer Realtor fees. After planning things out on Saturday (tape measures and graph paper! Huzzah!), we started moving things around shortly before lunch today. At one point we had managed to render no fewer than five rooms completely unusable because of the clutter and awkward furniture rearranging going on. Even now, with most of the worst behind us, I still have a sofa lying on its back in the middle of my living room floor, and it's going to be there until I can get the front door off its hinges and arrange for a neighbor to help us move the sofa out to the garage. So, like, August, I guess.
I also have a guest bedroom that's up in Liza's old room, a really small television room in what used to be the guest room, and a spacious craft studio (with separate spots for me, Jason, and Liza) and office in what used to be our family room. We're planning to cancel our cable subscription (again) since most of our favorite shows have been canceled, and we don't honestly have that much TV time in the evenings now that Liza goes to bed a bit later. So why would we need to devote the largest room in the house to watching television when we actually spend most of our time doing crafts or on the computer? Once we get the television moved and purchase a loveseat that will actually fit through the door to the new television room, I'll even have a comfy chair to sit and knit in next to the fireplace while Jason works on his Warhammer guys and the kid draws yet another picture of a butterfly.
There's still lots of organizing to do (although frankly, my craft area looks neater than it did this morning in the old room, which just shows how horrifying it was back then) and I get to look forward to a week of evenings going through paperwork with Jason to see what we can get away with shredding, but I feel really good about how it's turning out. And tonight, while I was puttering around putting my craft stuff away as best I could, Liza and Jason tried out their new haunts.
Despite her exhaustion-induced glare, she had the colored pencils hauled out within five minutes of Jason bringing the table up from the basement. Both Jason and Liza gave their areas a thumbs-up, which means all of my 14,948 trips up and down the stairs today were worth it. I'll remember that tomorrow as I chug down 14,948 Tylenol and ice down my aching knees.
**Built in the '80s, and based on the kitchen and bathroom, not remodeled since. I can vividly remember when my mother's friend Jane got those same kitchen cabinets installed - they were the height of fashion back in, oh, 1983 or so.
2 comments:
I understand.
We just busted out a wall in the 7year old's bedroom. We are expanding her room into the attic storage section. We finished framing the arched entrance, the wiring, and the insulating. Now it is time for drywall... ugh.
And we are trying to see how we can put a loft bed into the 10year old's bedroom. But we want the loft bed to look like it is a tree house. We have been pricing large cedar trees at some of the local lumber mills to see if we can have an actual tree as the main support.
As Jefferson said, "Every generation needs a revolution." And I think that he was talking about generations as measured in generations of iPhone.
I get that same feeling. Last time I had the feeling we added a few walls to give Moxen a bed room, and cut a whole in the floor and put in some (almost) navy stairs to the basement.
But I think I might steal the loft bed idea for Mox in a few more years (once he's out of the crib).
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