making space

Our nephew Lukas will come to live with us in the fall, so he can attend university near where we live. It's kind of nice that Lukas will arrive around the same time that Fiona will leave - daughter out, nephew in, somehow preserving the balance of things.

We are preparing a room for Lukas. It's in our basement, with nice access to the rec room which has a couch, tv, dvd, video games etc. Alex hangs out there a lot of the time now, so we picture the two cousins down there when they want to relax. It's big enough to invite a couple of friends over, even.

The room that will be Lukas's bedroom has been used for storage since we bought our house 20 years ago. We are now in the process of getting everything out of there, so we can move in a bed, dresser etc. Andrew and I tackled this project first on Friday evening. I pulled stuff out of the room, and Andrew took some of it to the dumpster that was in the complex for garage sale weekend. More stuff was labeled and taken to the carport for Saturday's sale. The stuff we want to keep will have to find new storage space around our house.

Storage displacement area #1 is the attic, so next I climbed into the attic and Andrew stood outside. I passed him boxes of stuff to take out of the house, either for dumping or for sale. A couple of boxes he decided to keep, so we re-atticed them or he took them somewhere else (not sure where). I managed to clear enough space to put the camping gear into the attic.

My next projects are the carport shed, the furnace room and the laundry room. All of those spaces contain things that we can give or throw away, thus making space for the rest of the stuff to come out of Lukas's room. Everything we need to keep will find a space, and we'll get rid of some junk and make better organized piles of the rest of it.

I wonder now if it would have been more efficient to start with the displacement areas (clearing the attic, shed, laundry room etc first) then tackle the room in the basement, moving things from there directly to their new spots? On the other hand, exploding the basement bedroom first started us on an un-pausable trajectory, because everything is a big mess right now and we want to get it finished. Working back to front might have given us greater opportunity for procrastination. Also, working the way we did, we managed to make best use of the dumpsters while they were here, and given our time available to work.

The room looks pretty awful right now, just half-cleared, really dusty, horrible curtains and the wires coming in from outside the house for our phone, internet and cable tv. Andrew has plans for making that work. I'll get on the curtains and we'll do a clean sweep and wash down once everything is out. We've offered to let Lukas choose the paint colour and help with painting if he likes. We have a bed and a dresser and there's already a nice closet in there.

Soon we will forget it was ever a storage room. We're excited to have Lukas coming and pretty pleased to know we actually have space in our house to make a new bedroom for him. Our whole home will be a bit lighter and cleaner too, for the effort. At least temporarily.

question: have you done any spring cleaning?

mompoet - amazed at what we keep