I first started thinking about rearranging several areas of our house months ago — before I was pregnant, but still knowing/hoping that we would eventually want another kid bedroom. At the time, I was really interested in figuring out how we could add some sort of playroom to our first floor that WASN’T also the living room…but we just didn’t have a ton of options, and thus my pipe dreams were never realized.
But as soon as I found out I was pregnant, I started again pondering how to best make use of our space. We have two bedrooms downstairs plus a large (and currently mostly unused) bonus room upstairs to work with. We need 1) a kid bedroom, 2) a guest bedroom, 3) a home office and 4) some sort of playroom.
You may have noticed that’s four spaces but only three rooms. The obvious solution is to turn the upstairs bonus room into an office AND playroom, and use the two bedrooms for kid #2 and guest room. (Other options included having Emma and her sister share a bedroom, turning one of the bedrooms into a office/guest room combo, or turning the bonus room into an office/guest room…but none of those seemed quite as good for various reasons.)
Current office / soon-to-be kid #2’s room
We finally got started on “the big move” last weekend. The desks you see in the photos above — Jose’s in the middle of the room and mine along the wall next to the window — have already been cleared off and moved upstairs. Whew! That move alone felt like a big step in the right direction.
Bonus room in its current random state
We also shifted the couch and coffee table upstairs about a foot more towards the bookshelves, which opened up enough space along the windows at the back of the room for our new home office. I’m currently sitting right in front of the left-most window at my new desk location, typing this post! The left half of the back wall will be my office, and the right half will be Jose’s.
And just for completeness, here’s the guest room. I have thoughts — for sometime in the future — of revamping this room to make it a little more useful to us during the 80-90% of the year that it’s not housing guests. We could replace my old furniture with a smaller daybed and dresser to regain a lot of floor space, and then move our treadmill (currently in the master bedroom), or create a little reading room, or just make it a playroom that can be temporarily co-opted to host occasional guests. We’ll see.
For now, here’s the rest of the to-do list:
- Move office bookshelves upstairs, leaving kid #2’s room totally empty.
- Paint kid #2’s room.
- Buy Emma a twin bed, convert her toddler bed back to a crib, and move it into kid #2’s room.
- Buy kid #2 a dresser.
- Buy kid #2 a bookshelf.
Whew. Guess we better get to work.