Last month I joined up with a project SRB started called “who needs it?” It will be a year long effort at decluttering the stuff in our lives – be it physical or emotional clutter. It’s never too late to join in!
At any rate, last year while I was pregnant I had already started trying to clean up / clean out a few areas in my life, and I’m going to start writing posts outlining the areas that I’ve already worked on.
Because I wasn’t doing it as part of this project back then I didn’t think of specifically taking before pictures, but here are a few photos of the evolution of our master bedroom. I figured since we spend about 1/3 of our life in this room, it was important to feel relaxed in that space, so that’s where I started. I still need to tackle the closets (up next since I can now get rid of my maternity wardrobe!), but with the closet doors closed, I actually feel at peace in our bedroom. 🙂
These first pictures are from right after we moved into the house in June 2010. We gutted and remodeled the kitchen area before moving in, and other than that we just repainted all of the walls in the house and had the carpets professionally cleaned. For the master bedroom we chose a color that we thought would be a soothing blue color, but it turned out to be a bright crayola blue. We both hated it SO MUCH that we went out the next day and bought the green you see here, even though we were completely burnt out on painting at the time. We routinely comment to each other how grateful we are that we changed it right away or we both know it never would have been done!
Over the past four years since those pictures were taken, there have been a couple of major furniture additions to our room. We bought 2 MALM dressers at Ikea for storage and to hold our TV & satellite stuff (the top left drawer also holds our DVD player & various hookup cords / movies/etc), and the elliptical moved into our room when the office/exercise loft at the top of the stairs turned into Stella’s bedroom. We also got a basic metal frame for the queen bed so it wasn’t on the floor, but apparently I never took a picture of the room in that state.
Last summer I wasn’t sleeping well thanks to being pregnant, and since we had been talking about upgrading to a king sized bed some day anyway, we decided to pull the trigger and get one! We wanted regular king instead of cali-king for bed sharing purposes (we wanted significantly wider, not longer), and I wanted a bed frame that had drawers for storage and a headboard for my water/alarm clock/cell phone/etc. When Stella slept in our room for the first 6 months of her life, it was constantly annoying to me to not have an end table because of the co-sleeper, and I figured having a headboard with storage would solve that problem. I was right! We ended up buying a platform bed frame online & a king mattress from a local furniture store.
During the transition and assembly phase:
After the new frame was assembled and bed delivered! (July 2013)
When Harvey arrived, it necessitated adding a few more items to our bedroom for the time being. The co-sleeper (even though he rarely sleeps in it, the twirp!), and the changing pad for diaper changes (so I’m not waking Stella up in the middle of the night for diaper changes). I also cleared out the top two drawers in the right hand dresser for diapers & newborn clothing for Harvey. The rest of his clothing is in the closet in Stella’s room, and I’m not quite sure how we’ll handle that. Eventually they’ll be sharing that room (probably by this summer?) so I guess we’ll figure it out then.
So there ya go! The room is a bit more cluttered now than I’d like, but unless we build an addition on our house, the elliptical needs to stay in our room (it just barely fits to unfold it along Charlie’s side of the bed in order to watch TV while I’m working out), and it’s just handier to have the changing pad & newborn items in our room for the time being. We’ve debated moving our bedroom to the actual master suite downstairs, but we really like having a guest room, so for now, things will stay like this. We’ll see how it goes when we have a 6 month old and 2 1/2 year old sharing a room this summer. 🙂