Renovations

Trystan and Owen share a bedroom, and we have an extra bedroom that I use as a sewing room/photography studio, which is used by guests when we have them.  The living room has been used as a playroom for years, but with the youngest, Owen, having reached ten years of age, it isn’t used very much any more.

The couches have been moved upstairs to an open area outside Megan’s room.  I originally planned to move them back to the new sewing room, but have enjoyed sitting there so much this past week that I think I will leave them where they are.  It is a southern exposure with trees just outside the window.  The sunlight, filtered through the autumn foliage this week, has invited me to sit there for my coffee most afternoons.

We have decided to change the children’s playroom into my “playroom”.  It will become my sewing and photography studio and I won’t have to vacate it when we have company.  The sewing room, a large room over the garage, will become Trystan’s bedroom, which will have two single beds in it, and be shared with Owen when we have company.  Owen will stay in his current bedroom, on his own, with a new daybed, which will fold out into a king size bed, when needed.

The current sewing room has never been painted and the walls are quite a mess.  The playroom and Trystan and Owen’s current bedroom were painted years ago, so all three rooms will be getting a fresh coat of paint.  I have been weeding out the toys since the spring, by donating the ones in good shape to the school, throwing out broken toys or ones with missing pieces and building a shelf in the basement to store the massive Lego collection, which I am unwilling to part with (the kids probably wouldn’t care).  Unfortunately, it turns out one shelf isn’t enough – we still have four large Ikea under-the-bed boxes in Trystan and Owen’s room full of Lego.   The toys shelves will become shelves for my quilting and photography supplies, and have been moved temporarily to the dining room, and reloaded with the toys and games for which I have yet to find a home.  Today we removed all the plates and curtain rods and started repairing the walls.

Unfortunately, the floor has become quite worn in the three places where desk chairs have been moved repeated over the years.  We don’t have the budget to replace the floor right now, nor do we want to spend a lot of time refinishing it.  If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Once the old playroom has been re-painted I will move in furniture from the old sewing room and move everything I want to keep.  Then we will paint the old sewing room and move in most of the furniture from Trystan and Owen’s room.  They will both move in while we re-paint Owen’s old room.

We aren’t very fast at these types of things so we hope to be done by Christmas since we often have company on New Year’s Eve.