Mixing things up

I still remember the excitement when my parents would rearrange the furniture in my room. It couldn’t have happened all that often because we moved every couple of years or so, but I have vivid memories of lying down in bed and seeing the room from a different perspective – and that moment of disorientation when I woke up the next morning and things were not in their usual places.

Our family moved into our current home in 2006. Tom & I bought bedroom furniture for the first time in our marriage and enjoyed the process of figuring out where everything would fit. And then everything stayed exactly where it was for six or seven years (which is crazy when I think about it, since as a child I didn’t even live in the same house for that long). Sometime in 2012 or 2013 I got tired of the room and decided to move things around. Our furniture is pretty substantial and I’m a short girl so it wasn’t exactly easy. I shoved and tugged and slid things this way and that … I remember being hot and sweaty and frustrated! I’d arrange things and step back and decide things were too crowded or the room felt unbalanced. So then there was another round of shoving and tugging and sliding. I finally finished with the bed more or less in the same place but on an angle. The large chest of drawers moved from in front of the bed to a nearby corner. My bedside table ended up tucked behind the bed – which Tom thought was highly impracticable (he wasn’t wrong!)

Recently I have been going through my house (again!) with the idea of reducing my belongings (one person just doesn’t need as much as five) and started thinking of all the stuff I have stashed in my bedroom. It got me thinking about rearranging my bedroom again. This time there was an app for that. Well – I still had to do the physical moving, but I had a much better idea of how things were going to look when I was done, since I laid everything out first.

Of course, like the storybook says, “if you give a mouse a cookie…” Once I started moving furniture and cleaning up all the dust, I thought I should really replace the baseboards while the furniture was away from the wall. Luckily the day I chose was a nice one so I didn’t mind running in and out of the garage to cut boards. But, a job that should have taken an hour or so ended up taking most of the day. Still – I’m enjoying the new arrangement. And I got that familiar feeling when I laid down in bed the first night!

View from the door
my lovely bathroom (sigh …)

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