Guest Room Situation and a Book Challenge

June 28, 2017

Upstairs in our little house, we have three bedrooms: the master, the little nursery, and a decently-sized guest room. This arrangement has been great for a family of three, but change is on its way. Baby girl is scheduled to arrive in October! The current guest room has a hodge podge of furniture.

We have a full sized bed in here that needs to stay. The side table is an Ikea find that we spray painted for Bradley’s last nursery, but there wasn’t space for it in this house. We also purchased the bookshelf from Ikea 9 years ago, but it is obviously full of my books. I really hate the dresser (my mom dropped it off 5+ years ago and I have been giving her a hard time about it ever since). Not only is it not our style at all, but the drawers don’t work well. We have the pack n play set up in here because my cousin is coming to visit tomorrow with her little girl – yay baby playtime! And obviously we have put zero effort into decorating the walls. I haven’t even committed the mirror to a spot.

Oh, and as a side note, here is an example of the weird outlets we have been battling throughout the entire house. Not only are the outlets clearly in need of replacing, but why are the covers completely random, mis-matched, and ugly?

Book Challenge

The first goal in this room is to sort and purge books. I have always loved to read. My favorite part about a snow day was getting to stay in bed all day and just read. One year I got really into trying to knock out all of the books on the BBC’s Top 100 list (I think I got in the 40s!) and I have wanted to join a book club for forever. But, full time care of a wild toddler makes for very little reading time these days. Nonetheless, I (like so many others) have a hard time parting with books. I did purge about 100 paperbacks when I first “KonMari-ed” our house in 2015, but it is time to do it again.

My goal is to go through all of our books and only keep what can fit in the beautiful lawyer’s bookcase in the living room. Surely I can Marie Kondo our books down to that cabinet!

Her philosophy is to put every single thing together so that you can see how much you actually have. I am going to cheat a little bit though: cookbooks that we love should be in the kitchen, reference books and scores can remain in the clarinet room, and kid books can stay in the nursery or playroom. I am just going to sort and purge my own books.

Closet Organization

The other most glaring issue we have in the guest room is the closet. Currently, it holds our coats and my craft stuff. It is packed, and it is a mess. But, we don’t have a coat closet anymore and I don’t want to store them in the unfinished (and dirty) basement. Nor am I prepared to store them in our modest bedroom closets. Same goes for my craft supplies. If and when we get that basement space finished, we will absolutely build some closet storage. In the meantime…

I came up with another idea that could help! What about turning the Ikea bookcase into a little baby armoire? We could add a rod to the top and use baskets to contain all the little clothes on the shelves below. What do you think? 🤔