Room To Move? Part Two

Partly because I loved my dressers, and partly because I also didn't want to spend money buying something I didn't want, I really didn't want to buy new dressers for us. I looked on Craigslist and various store websites. I finally found a set that I liked, and realized that I'd seen it before. I went back to Craigslist and found the same set sold at a local furniture store for a lot less money. So our bedroom set will match, even though all the pieces won't be in same room.

So you might be thinking, “Why don't you take the wall down between the two rooms and make one larger room”? My husband had a friend who was a talented contractor. When we first moved in, he came over to give us an estimate to do that. He told us that because of the construction of our house, every wall is a load-bearing wall. We'd have to get an engineer; it wasn't something he felt comfortable doing. So that's why we live with the tiny rooms.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my mom's clothes are still here. The room that was hers when she was living with us has a closet. That closet was loaded with more of my mom's things. Emptying that closet was a necessity because my husband and I were going to have to use it for our things. In that closet are things I just can't touch; up on the shelf of the closet are all of my mom's journals. She started keeping a journal sometime after my dad passed away in 1996. I left all of them there, untouched.

Changing rooms also requires painting. I'm a terrible painter, I've always been a terrible painter. I'm okay painting small things, but walls, ceilings, houses? Terrible. I never know if I'm using too much paint or not enough paint. We have to paint two rooms. The room my daughter is in now is a really pretty purple color. It's great for her, not so great for us. The room we have now is a toast color. Great for us, not so great for her. Also, one of the previous owners of the house decided to paint all of the baseboards, window trim, and part of the floor a glossy black. The floor was painted black from the perimeter of the room to about 3 feet in, and the floor was left natural in the shape of a large area rug. Glossy black.

Rather than try to strip all of it, after talking to paint guys at the store, they said that using a good stain-blocking primer will allow us the paint the trim white without the black leaching through. I'll let you know if it works.

Black floor and trim update: My husband and daughter got all the trim and part of the floor primed yesterday. As of last night, it looked like it covered pretty well. 

We had to empty the craft room because that will be our “dresser room”. We took all the stuff from there to what we call “The Crazy Room”. “The Crazy Room” is a space we have upstairs between my son's room and our room (soon to be my daughter's room). It's really not a room at all, just an open space. That's where the craft room will be. On the bright side, the craft room (the current craft room, not the future craft room) doesn't have to be painted.

Oh, and speaking of painting, here's your PSA for the day: don't try to choose paint colors online. You probably already knew that, just like I did, but I thought maybe with the newer computer, the colors would show truer. I had a really nice blue (like a gunmetal blue, or a slate blue; a blue with gray undertones) picked out from a paint website. Now, I saw it on my computer, and I saw it on my phone. On one device, it sort of looked like it was more green than blue. When we got to the store, my daughter grabbed the paint chip from the rack, and indeed, it was a lovely green color with no real blue. It was a great color, I just wasn't interested in it for our room.

So where is my son in all of this? Well, since my husband and I are downsizing our bed, and my daughter didn't want to upgrade to a king-sized bed, my son decided that he wants our king-sized bed. Luckily his room was painted recently and he still likes the color. I found a really inexpensive ($40 for 10 pieces in king size!) bedding set for him. That should be one of the easier moves.

Speaking of bedding, I spent a lot of time looking at comforters. I had to find a set for my son, a set for us, and I told my daughter that I'd get a set for her since she was going from a purple room to an aqua-ish colored room. I looked at bedding until they all started to look the same. I found sets for my kids, and I decided that I'm going to keep the comforter set we have. It's a king, and our new bed is a queen, but it's made so that I think it will still look fine; it will just hang down lower.

It took me a long time to find that set. I'm picky and frugal so it's hard to find a set that is my taste and also not too expensive (by my standards).