Sunday, February 06, 2005

Nesting - or... Closet Excavation

A very busy weekend

On Friday Tina and I each met with our SW individually. We both felt like our meetings went well. JoAnn is very easy to talk to, and has been very helpful in providing information and perspective on international adoption. She scheduled her home visit for Tuesday; she'll meet with each of the boys at that time.

Now so you know, I think we keep the house pretty clean. We're not as compulsive about it as my sister, and we don't use a housecleaning service like my brother, so the place isn't spotless, but considering the amount of stuff we've got in the amount (or lack thereof) space we have, it's pretty clean. Okay, so that being said, a home visit from a social worker doing a "study" is probably more than enough motivation to kick the weekend chores into overdrive.

Our ultimate goal right now of course is to convert our "extra" room into a nursery. The problem with this is that this room is not really "extra". There is no extra space in the house. We don't call the room the "extra" room, we call it "The Green Room", because when we remodeled about 10 years ago, we wallpapered one of the walls dark green and decorated with green colors. We started jokingly referring to it as The Green Room. It eventually stuck, and now it is The Green Room. And that Green Room is used for everything!

Now pretty much everything has to come out of there. But where will it go? Time to rethink all the other storage spaces in the house. Step one, Scott & Tina's closet. This was a crazy idea, but it did need to happen. We bought 2 of these ClosetMAID Systems. Then we took everything (I mean EVERYTHING) out of our closet so we could install them. When we got everything out of that closet we rediscovered the walls had needed painting when we moved into that closet 18 years ago. Se we went and got spackle and paint. Good thing we got up early.

While the paint was drying we took the old dog house to the dump, and the old dresser out of our closet to GoodWill. We were ready to start installing the closet systems by about 4:00PM.

I wonder which of the language sets on the instruction sheet has all the instructions? It's not the English set. Since we had two full sets to install we actually did the second set correctly the first time through. We planned to sleep in the living room if we didn't finish the project in one day, but we pressed on through, till 1:00AM and got the whole thing put back together, and slept in our own bed. I have to say, it was worth it! Tina and I both go in the closet now and marvel at the space. It is very different than before. We took a second huge load to GoodWill the next day, and got through most of the housework. Thank goodness the SW's home visit isn't till Tuesday!

We are going to do pantry and the coat closet too. We are hoping that we will gain some more space there for relocating stuff out of The Green Room.

Soon to be "Kai's Room"!!

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