The great room switch

I am deeply disappointed with myself that I did not better document with pictures the process of switching rooms.  I really wish I would have taken more and better before and after pictures.  I either didn't take any, or when I was half way through with a project.  None of these really captured the majesty or chaos of what I accomplished.  It was truly amazing.

We decided that Brock was going to move into the basement room.  Noah was going to move into Dane and Eve's room (it was the smallest).  Dane and Eve were going to move into the girls room (it has the castle) and the girls were going to move into the boys' room (it was the only one left).  That project alone should have been daunting enough.  But the prep that it was going to take to even get to the stage of moving rooms was monumental.  And on top of  that we decided to paint Brock and the girls rooms.  Did I mention I was doing this the week before Christmas so that we could switch rooms the week between Christmas and New Years (the only whole week the kids had out of school).

Before we could move rooms I needed to clean out our basement room.  This room was a guest room, a preschool supplies room, and a "catch all" for other storage.   To clean this room out I needed to make more space in other locations in the house.  But I didn't have other locations.  We had plenty of ROOM to store things, but not proper storage systems.  I had a lot of waisted space in the storage room - but to get more space I would have to completely unpack all of our food storage, buy (find on Facebook marketplace) new shelves and re organize everything.  I would need to do this to our crawl space, downstairs bathroom, food storage room and garage.  It was a monumental task.  I couldn't really have anyone help me because I didn't have a vision yet.  I kept procrastinating the project because I didn't have a vision of how it would look or where it would all go.  But time had run out and i needed to just start and have faith the vision would come to me as i went.  And it did.  I accomplished all the needed to be accomplished and it was more glorious that I could have imagined when I started.  This whole room got emptied out and redistributed.  I SO WISH I would have taken pictures of the food storage before and after.  It was a thing of beauty. 

This is actually very clean and organized.  I took this picture about 3 days into the project.  So a lot of progress has already been made (surprisingly enough)

We didn't have a basement for a few days.  But Brock was having a Christmas party with frineds that weekend - so I knew I HAD to finish by then.  The day before every single person (including Brock's friends) told me it wouldn't be ready.  Well... it was!

Then Brock and I started painting.  I had never painted anything before.  I never thought I wanted to.  But I really wanted to.  I realized that I was "reverse nesting".  It isn't a real thing.  But I discovered that was what I was doing.  I wanted to create a place for Brock that he could leave.  It filled my mother heart.  He wanted the whole room to be black.  I let him have one black wall.  

Painting took WAAAAYYYY longer than I thought and Jason stepped in and saved the day and let me just paint for almost 48 hours straight.  I hardly ate or slept.  

A few days later we started on the actual switching of room.  First we had to empty all the rooms.  It all went into the hall.  

Then they had to deep deep deep clean their rooms.  They loved it!

Then we decided to paint the girls' room.  Again, I got in over my head and Jason just took over all the other jobs so I could finish their room.  

I thoroughly enjoyed painting with these two though . We listened to Taylor Swift for 2 days and painted and talked.  It was really fun. 

AND... I have no after pictures.  Maybe I will go around and take some next time their rooms are clean.  Sure wish  I would have done it months ago.  Sad.  I am grateful we did it.  Things are so much more organized and I loved the process.  Everything has worked out well, except for Brock.  He should have never been allowed to go downstairs.  He keeps his room and bathroom a disaster.  It is truly horrible.  But it didn't seem fair to keep punishing Noah for Brock.  So it is hard to say.  However, Brock is the one that convinced us to do that move because he knew for sure that having his own room downstairs would make him cleaner, more responsible, more independent, and more spiritual.  He was wrong on all counts.