For about a year now, CootieGirl has asked if she can have the guest room as her own. After some back and forth, I decided it would be a great idea for her. First, it will allow her to have a bit more space as she leaves high school and enters college (which she’ll be attending while living at home to be able to graduate with zero debt). It also gives her a bit more privacy having her bedroom at the end of the hall versus right at the top of the stairs. The added bonus is she’ll also be closer to the hall bathroom, which is pretty much exclusively hers since CootieBoy uses our master bathroom for almost everything. Not only that, but we only have guests come and stay in that room once or twice a year, whereas CG LIVES in her room except for meals and when she’s watching TV with me. So she deserves the bigger space, for sure.
I told her earlier this year that we’d do the room switch at Christmastime. Since the guest room houses all our Christmas decorations, it seemed fitting that once those were all out, we could make the room switch. However, 2020 has been pretty sucky. In the end, we decided to go ahead and do her room switch now. Denis brought down all the Christmas stuff and put it in the living room, and yesterday CG and I began boxing up the books that were housed in the guest room. We then put away any Christmas stuff NOT being used this year back in the Christmas closet (we’ve opted NOT to host “A Very COVID White Elephant Party” this year). After that there wasn’t much we could to clean out the room – we needed more boxes for books!
This morning, however, we got to work in CG’s room. First, we moved the bed so that we could gain access to the attic stairs so that we could put the boxes of books and the empty bookcases up there. I then gave her a super-big box and told her to put all her knick-knacks and other junk in that box (she has a lot). She also began moving her art pieces into the guest room (she had a lot just propped up against the wall because she had no more wall space).
The only issue I worried about is that CG’s room is smaller than the guest room. Currently, I keep my grandmother’s sewing cabinet in the guest room and I wasn’t sure it would fit in CG’s original bedroom. However, the cabinet is only 20″ deep and 41″ wide. At the moment my daughter keeps her desk in her closet since she doesn’t use it for clothes, and her desk is bigger (both deeper and wider) than the sewing cabinet. As such, I decided to put the sewing cabinet in the closet. There will still be plenty of room for guests to hang clothes should they wish to. This means the bedroom will have plenty of space for the bed, night tables, dresser, and a small chair. Very happy about that.
I know we likely won’t be able to finish it all today (even as I type she is STILL filling that giant box with all the miscellaneous junk from her room), but by next weekend we should be completely done. I know CG will be excited to have a bit more space. AND: we will have gotten rid of some junk we no longer need, we’ll have done a deep clean in both rooms, and then I can begin decorating the house for Christmas (Denis told me I couldn’t start decorating until CG’s room got switched out).  WOO HOO!!!!
