As I’ve talked about in previous posts, we were able to mostly empty three bedrooms prior to moving in. This was important for two reasons – the obvious being so we would have rooms of our own to live and sleep in. The second, and more immediately pressing thing, was simply to have a place to put our stuff! So, that’s what we did – when we moved in, we put our stuff in our bedrooms…and did little else with it while we worked on the kitchen 🤣

At the one-month mark, our 16-year-old’s room is close to done – empty of everything that isn’t hers except a dresser, a small armoire and a large bookshelf. Her rug is down, her bed is up, and her desk is in place. She mostly just needs to put stuff away, put that was perpetually true of her room in the old house, too 🙃

Our 10-year-old’s room is…chaos. When we moved in, the rug for her room was out to be cleaned, so there wasn’t much point in getting things set up in there. The furniture is a jumbled mess, including a full-sized bed frame that will be going away. The bed frame is, in turn, covered with clothes from the closet in our bedroom, because that was the best place to put them during the chaos of move-in. Those clothes are all going away. But, before that, they need to be sorted into piles for specific people, to be sold, or to donate.

My daughter’s things are just sort of strewn about, because there is no good place to put them. She’s been sleeping on the couch in the living room (she slept by choice on a couch in our old house, so this isn’t a terrible hardship for her 😂).

So the kitchen is finished (enough) to move on, and the rug is ready to be picked up at the cleaner’s – let’s put together our kid’s room! Three minor snags and one major one –

minor snag one – I’m sick 🤧…not like bed-ridden, just your standard head cold, but I’m coughing a lot and breathing heavily and tiring easily, so the going is just much slower than I would like.

minor snag two – we’re getting a new water heater.

This is a very good thing, as our hot water has been intermittent (at best) since we moved in. The only thing this has to do with my daughter’s room (other than needing to boil water for cleaning 😂) is that we had to take time off from her room to make space in the basement so the guys could work. Fortunately, we’d already done a lot in that part of the basement during the kitchen project, so it only took a couple of hours to tile-game things around.

The major snag was the closets. My daughter’s room has a good-sized built-in closet, a large armoire, a small armoire, and two dressers. My aunt and I had agreed that she could keep her things in the built-in closet and the large armoire. My daughter doesn’t have that many clothes, and we wouldn’t have another place to put my aunt’s things. So, when I did my pre-move-in cleaning, I ignored the closets. This would have been fine, except the prior occupant, despite promising not to, smoked cigarettes in the room🤢. Lots and lots of cigarettes. I had hoped maybe the closets were contained enough that scrubbing the entire room and leaving an exhaust fan in the window would be enough, but no luck 😫…despite all the work that I had done, with a coinciding dramatic improvement in the degree of smell, the stench from closets bled into the rest of the room. This resulted in a multi-day project we had not planned on.

We took all the clothes out of both closets and hung them on the porch to air out; took down all the bins and boxes from the shelves, vacuumed them, washed them, and put them back; took shoes and other random loose items off the floors; then vacuumed and washed the insides of both closets ceiling to floor. As of this writing, we have not yet put the clothes back in the closet, as we want to make sure they are thoroughly aired before doing so.

minor snag three – I realize at 4:28 on Friday that the carpet-cleaning place closes at 4:30, and is closed all weekend 😢 So, poor kid still has to wait another three days before we can put her room together. We did, at least, get everything picked up and moved to one side of the room, so when we pick up the rug on Monday we can unroll it halfway, put all the stuff on top of it, sweep and mop the other side of the room, unroll the rug the rest of the way, and then we can actually set up the room for our daughter!

So by next week, both of our daughter’s rooms should be done, and maybe we’ll even work on ours 🙃!