Thursday, August 31, 2006

The During

OK, you want to know the details? Well, for one thing, most ofe stuff that was in that room is still here, either in the house or in the garage. One of the bookcases was moved into the guest room's closet, and the smaller boxes of craft items are on it. Boxes of comic books were moved out into another part of the house; they will be sold eventually. Some things went into the donate pile, others into the ebay bins or boxes of books to be sold.

What happened was that I realized that to make the changes necessary to turn a junk room into a guest room, most of the items had to be simply physically removed, to make space for the couch/bed and in order to vacuum the rug (which hadn't been vacuumed since it was put down three years ago). Once most of the stuff was out, you could see the 'bones' of the room, and figure out where the furniture had to be to fit without covering over either of the windows.

There is still a great deal of work to be done with the stuff that was removed. Lots of sorting, filing, many decisions. But now, we can have guests over to stay and offer them a civilized place to sleep.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just wanted to add a little about the process because I think it will help other people. The first thing we talked about was what she wanted this room to be? what she wanted to be able to do in there? The room will have a couple functions, which is fine. One of them being the guest room, so you need to think about what you need for that, a place to sleep, a table (or in the case hope chest) to put a lamp, and having a fairly clean area helps the guest feel more welcome. The second thing she wanted this room to do was be the craft/sewing/scrapbooking room. For this she needs all of her supplies and a table. She has a table that needs some paint before it comes in the room, but it's already got a spot, right under a window-nice! So, this is why we moved some things out of the big closet and that will serve as a storage area for supplies...the bookself we moved in works nicely to hold pictures and some of the craft items.

This way of putting things together has worked well for me, some call it the Kindergarten method, keeping things grouped together by their function. I found this helps in 2 ways (at least) 1. you tend to use the space for what it is intended and 2. things are easier to put away if it's right there.