Changing Rooms

It's half term for Little Z, Big J and I, and as Chris also has a week off work, it's been the ideal opportunity to have lots of family time, which can be difficult when we are all at school or work (or both!).

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?

Room

Many months ago, I blogged about how Big J had taken to sleeping on the floor of his bedroom so we had taken his bed out of his room and put a mattress down for him to sleep on. I think he quite liked sleeping on the mattress on the floor and it certainly made it easier when we went camping as he was already used to it!

While attempting to clear out the garage, I came across Big J's bed and thought maybe it was about time he stop sleeping on the floor.

We assembled the bed. It wouldn't fit! The bed he used to sleep in was a child's bed. This was a full size one and just an inch too long for the space we wanted it to go into. Bum!

We had already broken the already flimsy wardrobe by moving it. Now we had to move it again. Larry was getting frustrated to say the least with my constant flow of suggestions as to how to solve the problem and it was getting closer to Big J's bedtime. It was looking increasingly like Big J was going to be sleeping on the floor again.

Finally, we managed to find a place for the bed, the wardrobe and the toy box leaving just about enough room to swing a goldfish.

Tuesday saw a necessary trip to The Range (Hardware etc. store) to buy some storage boxes to go under his bed. These replaced the toy box which is now going to take the bed's place in the garage (I'm sure there is some kind of logic here?! Please let me know if you spot it!) We also found a cute pop up storage panda, which we filled with all his soft toys. At last we could see some floor space.



This morning, after hearing some banging from Big J's room, I anxiously called to him to ask what he was doing. "I'm Hiding in my polar bear!". So much for buying a cute storage solution. He thought it was a tent! No sooner do I put the toys into the panda, than he has taken them all out again so that he can climb into it.



And the floor space has gone again! Oh well, easy come, easy go!