A Life Update

So life has been crazy. I was just starting to figure out the stay-at-home mom thing when we found out that I may be in the beginning stages of pre-eclampsia at 38 weeks pregnant. And so with a diagnosis of gestational hypertension, I was admitted to the hospital to be induced. Several hours later, which included 2.5 hours of labor and my husband literally catching our child after one push before she fell in the toilet (there was no one in the room with us at the time), and we had a perfect daughter. She's now just over 2 weeks old and my husband goes back to work tomorrow.

So that's the big news. In smaller news, I have been working on the decluttering challenge at my own pace. It was really difficult in the late stages of pregnancy, because I pretty much had to do the decluttering mentally and then expend as little energy as possible to get up and pull out the stuff I wanted to get rid of. I have continued pulling stuff off bookshelves and other places as I see things that we don't actually need. So while it's not going very quickly, things are moving along. I was able to remove enough books from my bookshelves to move some stuff around and put some of our baby books on a different shelf, where they seem to be existing largely undisturbed so far, while the board books that our son still loves for us to read to him, he has easy access to.

Finally, I tackled the kid's room for my dream house. I knew that I didn't want it any bigger than would fit a bed, a bedside table, a shelf, a desk and chair, and a closet. Since we have two kids, I would just do mirror image rooms for them and they'll look the same. With a good organizer system in the closet, they won't need a dresser either.

So first I figured out roughly how much space I needed for each item I wanted in the room. Then I started drawing. I wasn't satisfied with the extra space left in the first drawing (left), so I tried again. I think I like the layout of the second drawing (right) and that ends up at roughly 10 feet by 6.66 feet, or a total of 67 square feet per child, 134 square feet for both rooms.

I want the bed to be built in, either as a loft bed, or an alcove bed with storage underneath. I could see the desk, shelving unit and bedside table to be built ins as well, so that there is floor to ceiling storage in every square inch of the room. Not that my kids should need that much space for their stuff, but if they do, they'll have it. Hopefully they'll enjoy reading too, so they'll need some space for their books. One window at the end of the room, the bigger the better to let in lots of light.

So far that brings the total square footage of our house to about 218 square feet.

Dream House - Study

So over the years my dream house has evolved. For the most part in a size reduction sort of way. I've been trying to figure out the minimum amount of space we would need to be truly comfortable and have space for all the things that are important to us: gaming, reading, entertaining (mostly dinner parties), crafting (in my case), etc. Some of these things require flexibility in space, some things require dedicated space, and some require a decent amount of space (a craft room for example). I'm not sure what the finished product is going to look like, but I have been scaling back the amount of space to a bare minimum and went through that exercise with the study first.

This is the plan I came up with. It includes two sitting/standing desks, with file drawers and room for the printer in between. And on the other side a door to keep the tiny humans away from the cables and computers, in between two built-in bookshelves/cabinets. The door would ideally either be a Dutch door, or one with window panes, or a combination of the two, so that we can throw an eye on the tiny humans occasionally. Currently we share one larger desk, but too often hubby's dirty dishes end up directly in front of my computer, or his clutter drifts over to my side and vice versa. So it would be really nice to have defined spaces for each of us.

I wanted to go with standard sized desks, according to this Houzz article, that would be about 30x60 inches. This should give us plenty of room underneath the desks to store our computer towers and maybe a trash can or recycling bin. Above the desks, I'd want built in shelves, and in between the desks, I'd want two file drawers on the bottom, then a cubby for the printer, and then more shelves above that, potentially with a door.

The built-in bookshelves on the other side would have cabinets on the bottom, then a row or two of drawers for smaller items, and then open shelves. One more shelf above the door would round out the built-ins. I would want a window on one end of the office and a wall to hang up a large white/pin board on the other side.

Based on my calculations, this room would have to be about 12 feet wide by 7 feet deep. Not super tiny, but definitely efficient.

I envision storing the following in the office:

Open Shelves: books related to computers and coding, maybe our roleplaying books, binders, journals, yearbooks, photo albums, first edition books that we don't want the tiny humans to have access to, magazines

Cabinets: spare paper, shredder, briefcases/computer bags, games (unless there is a better place for these, because we have a lot), computer game discs, misc. boxes with things like computer game manuals

Drawers: pens, pencils, markers, scissors, cords and accessories, spare batteries, hole punch, ruler, stapler, tape, etc.

File Cabinets: all the paper files waiting to be put into binders