Redecorating

On Friday night I decided to look through some of my Real Simple and Do It Yourself magazines before bed. Earlier in the week Todd and I had been talking about whether we should keep Elijah in the office and make the room his or try to hold out a little longer and see if Ev gets better during her nap time and see if we could move Elijah in with her. Our original desire was to only keep Elijah temporarily in the office and move him into Ev's room when he was sleeping longer stretches at night. That ended up taking a lot longer than we had expected and since we were gone for a couple of months when we got back in February we just decided to keep everyone where they were at because we all loved having our own rooms. Since then Ev has decided that a few days during the week she isn't sleepy so she lays awake during nap time. We are trying to teach her to stay in her bed she has seemed to regress in this area there once was a time where she would stay in her bed. The past month we have had quite a battle with her and it has lead us to keep Elijah in the office indefinitely. Our office once was a office/guest room. But when we had Elijah we moved our futon out of the room and put the crib in its place. We moved the futon into Ev's room. Both of our rooms are little so no much fits in them. With the talk of keeping Elijah in the office we needed to downsize the furniture. In addition to putting the crib in the office we had bought another piece to use as a make sift diaper changer station. In reality the room is really crammed with furniture and Elijah sleeps there and we don't use it for anything but storing our stuff. We really love our desk/bookshelf set but I decided that realistically we need something very small to use as a desk. We have wireless so we usually sit on our couch to work on the computer. There are a few times when Todd needs to do work on the computer that requires him to be at a desk but he has deferred to using our kitchen table.

The little light bulb in my head clicked on. I saw a couple of things in the magazines I was reading and I drew a picture of what I was envisioning in my head to solve our space problem. We are going to try to sell our desk set along with the cozy office chair. With those big items out of the office it will then be turned into Elijah/guest room. We will be able to put the crib along the wall where our desk was and put the futon back in the room. There will be so much space in there. As for the office we will use part of our dining room. We have a ton of books and office stuff so I needed a place to store them along side a small desk and also a place to store all my dishes and decorative things. My kitchen is so small that the refrigerator doesn't fit so that is also in the dining room. We also don't have a hall closet so we have a piece of furniture that holds our gloves, baby gear and all of that junk. That is also in the dinning room. So picture with me a small dinning room with a catch all piece of furniture, a table and chairs, a desk, a refrigerator and everything from an office and all of my dishes and decorating things.

I came up with a way that I think solves my space problem. We went to our wonderful little used furniture market and bought 2 big pieces and 1 desk for about 450 kuai. That is about $80 or so. Not bad at all. I already had a mirror hanging in the middle of the one wall so we put the desk underneath and the 2 matching pieces on each side. The piece closest to my kitchen houses all of my dishes, silverware, dish towels, tablecloths, place mats, along with some decorative items, all of Ev's craft supplies and our cereal boxes and snack foods. I am so happy those have a home because up until now our snack items have been housed on top of our fridge. Now they are all unseen. In the other piece of furniture we fit all of our books, important papers, my scrapbooks, Todd's electronic stuff, cds, office supplies, my sewing machine, my art box, a laminator... and other junk. All of which are nicely behind close doors. We did have to put our printer on top of one of the pieces of furniture but I put some other decorative things on top so it doesn't look so out of place. My fridge now has my nice ivy plant on top instead of a ton of food and I really like how things turned out.

The first pictures are of the before and then of course you can tell which ones are after shots. What do you think? Once we sell the big desk/bookshelf set from Elijah's room and I am able to rearrange his room I will take pictures and post them. I love to organize and I love when things are in their place. Ahh... I feel like I can go to bed now! :)