A New Baby Means Lots Of Redecorating!

With baby #2 on the way, there is lots of excitement, commotion and redecorating! We live in a four-bedroom house, and once upon a time we had a master, an office and two guest rooms. When K came along, eliminating a guest room was easy. There was almost nothing in the room except the furniture (which we gave to my sister) and an elliptical machine (which we sold). Easy peasy. Making room for baby #2, not so easy.

For one, I am a pack rat extraordinaire. This time the guest room was not only filled with furniture (which we sold on Craigslist), but the closet and under the bed were filled to the brim with storage. And the office… well, it was so overflowing that we didn’t allow guests in there because it was embarrassing. The office was a combo my husband’s office, my office, my craft room and storage of lots of things I was “saving.”

To make the project even bigger, instead of just converting the guest room to a nursery, we had the brilliant idea to redo all three rooms at once. (Seemed like a good idea at the time.) The guest room became the office, the office became K’s room and K’s room is becoming the nursery. Whew!

(The old guest room)

After weeks of working in the rooms during every spare waking moment, we are finally seeing progress. After parting with piles and piles of papers and a lot of other stuff, we are almost down to a workable amount of stuff to go in the office (don’t mind the piles in the pictures — most of that is baby stuff to go in the nursery, but I am not there yet). But since I still have tons of stuff, finding the perfect storage cabinets for home offices was paramount. After searching solutions, we went with lots of shelves — LOTS of shelves.

(My new shelves – still getting things settled.)

It isn’t the perfect office. It is very eclectic, in other words, none of the furniture matches. I have a beautiful light wood desk (still no chair) and my husband has a cheap (like $30) desk from an office store, but it is workable. Someday I dream of having a professional come in and redo the space with beautiful matching furniture (like a black Vantage corner desk from Bush Furniture) and cute coordinating storage solutions (like you see in magazines). But for now, I am proud of my storage shelf, and I am happy that once we move out the baby stuff I will actually have an office that you can see the floor in! My number one goal for this room, to keep it where I am never again embarrassed to let guests see it.

(More to come on my home decorating projects.)

(My desk – still needs some organization.)