Some of you may remember that we took the wall to wall carpeting out of our living room, dining room and hallway by the downstairs bedrooms last year. When we moved in and saw this white carpet, I knew that it was going to have to go. I love wood floors, first of all, and knew from the floor in the master bedroom that the wood was in decent shape (I won't go as far as great shape, but decent) and second of all--WHITE carpet? With four kids and umpteen pets? I think not! So after we got all settled that was the first thing on my mind. It went fairly quickly, but by the time we finished we left Emma's bedroom alone. We rationalized that her carpet was the cleanest (low traffic area when one elderly lady lived here) and that it would keep her warmer, and was nice to play on. Now, however, we are preparing to have the floors refinished, which means that the carpet had to go. So I decided to do it yesterday.
We had friends over for dinner on Saturday, which meant that, in addition to two ball games and Julia's Brownie meeting and a play date with her best friend, we also had to clean the house and cook and bake....then we had our fun time, and stayed up far too late. We slept in the next morning, but Matt was scheduled to pick up a bed frame for us from a nearby freecycler, so he had to do that, then take apart our bed frame and put together the new bed (which I love, by the way--it is a sleigh style, but the headboard and footboard are dark brown wicker, so it has a country feel to it...) and so he was less than thrilled when I decided to take up carpeting.
He was even less thrilled when I informed him that although Emma's room is the smallest by far in our house, it was taking a really long time because the wood strips with the tiny nails to hold the carpeting down were rotting, AND they used more nails than they had in the other rooms. Where in the living room I was prying up strips that were a foot or two long at a time, in Emma's room I was having no success because the wood was splintering. I ended up using pliers to wrench it up, and then pulling the nails out with the hammer. It was extremely slow going. Matt took over after diner, and was able to go much faster than I had, mercifully. (Though he KNOWS that he's going to have to add trim to the baseboards, the way he did in the rest of the rooms in order to have the baseboards meet the floor, I am NOT bringing it up at this time! Plus, the arrangement of furniture hides it anyway. I'll wait till we have the floors done and have to empty all the furniture out!)
I rearranged her furniture--and I am amazed how different the room looks! Completely different. Part of it is that I took some of her toys down to the family room, so there's more space, but changing the bed, dresser, bookshelf, etc--it looks so much nicer. I am very happy with it and will post photos later. I also had to change our room a bit. Because the new bed is so big, our computer desk had to be moved (we can't change the orientation of the bed, to my chagrin, because we have wall sconces for reading)--but to do that we had to move Matt's dresser. Well, Matt's dresser is big--so that had to leave the room. But where would he put his clothes? My solution (which he didn't think would work at all, but turned out nicely in fact) was for me to keep my one skinny little lingerie drawer but empty the rest of my dresser to my closet, and let him have the dresser.
We have a very big shelf that goes across the whole closet, and I have those shelf separators for sweaters. I'd installed them, but didn't put them to much use--till now. Now I have one part of the shelf for pajamas, once for pants and one for shirts that I kept in a drawer (some of my shirts hang in the closet...) Everything fits with plenty of extra room (on the off chance that my wardrobe increases--ha ha!) and Matt has the remaining dresser to himself. Our room is much airier without the huge dresser, even with a bigger bed, and it's nice to have the desk in a different spot since we can't move the bed itself....I even have room to add a bookshelf or something else if I want to. But I'll wait till Matt adjusts to the changes first! It's really amazing how rearranging furniture can upset him! (I asked him if he was autistic--that didn't go too well...)
--Jen
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