It has also been a good chance to work together to get the house tidy. I find it hard to get motivated to do it when I am on my own, mainly because I so rarely have time on my own that when I do, I want to use it to sit down with my Kindle.
By yesterday, we had managed to tidy the living room, dining room and the surface in the kitchen which always gets cluttered with bits and pieces that don't seem to belong anywhere and which don't quite make it to the kitchen bits-and-bobs drawer.
We were so pleased with what we had achieved, we went a little crazy and decided to have a go at the conservatory. You have to have have seen our conservatory recently to really appreciate the extent of this job, but when I say we couldn't see the floor, I mean just that.
It had become a dumping ground for my teacher resources (files & folders, loose paperwork, laminates, stationary, photographs, puppets etc.), which occupied the right hand side of the conservatory, not only in approximately 6 boxes stacked up on top of the toy storage unit, but also all over the floor where bags or boxes had split and let paper simply spill out over the carpet.
The other side of the room was filled with toys and clothes the children had grown out of. We had intended to do a car boot sale (not even last Summer, but the one before!), but had never got around to it and so what was neatly arranged bags and boxes, gradually became split bags and torn boxes and 'I don't want to get rid of that' toys were left untidily on the floor after a quick pull-from-the-bottom-of-the-pile-and-play,-while-no-one-is-looking.
We spent all day clearing the conservatory of junk, and although there were some lovely, "hey, come and look what I've found," or, "Great, I've been looking for this!" moments, it was very hard work.
We now have another room which can actually be used. It's amazing. When it was full of rubbish, I don't think I really appreciated that it was a whole room we could actually be using as living space. We haven't used it as a room for at least 2 years and I wish now that I'd done it a long time ago.
It's already making a difference. Big J likes to have some time to himself; it's something we taught him to do when he was younger if he was getting angry and needed to calm down. The conservatory is the perfect place for him to do that. It's a quiet room to sit and think without all the noise of the rest of the family. He has taken in some of his pencils for the art table we've set up, which he is keen to start using, and he spent 20 mins in there practising his karate kata.
I have no doubt we will all benefit from the additional space in our own ways. Me? Need you ask?
