My Multi-purpose Room

One of my projects for about the past six months has been to reclaim our second bedroom. Especially after we brought our stuff home from storage in Arizona that bedroom became our generic place to put stuff. And more stuff. And anything else we didn't want to deal with right away. It didn't help that I came home from Mom and Dad's at Christmas with 2 boxes of memorabilia from high school.

As I worked on going through things I assured Marty that it would get better some day. I don't think he believed me. Slow and steady I threw things away, put things in notebooks or totes, and found homes for all (or at least most) of the stuff. One Saturday a couple weeks ago I called Marty in to see. The floor was cleared enough to vaccuum. That was a huge step, but I still wasn't done.

Early last week I decided that I wanted a craft table in this room--for the crafty things I've been doing (I'll talk about them in a later post). Craigslist helped me out there. I found a free office desk. The guy I talked to warned me that it was heavy. He told me 250 pounds. I passed that information on to my work crew--Marty and our home teacher. No problem! Can't be worse than the sleeper-sofa that they moved up here back in September. If the guy had estimated the weight correctly. But the time they got to the apartment, they had already recruited more help to get it up the stairs and into our apartment. And then I was told not to call them when we move. Or that the desk would just stay put when we move. The final estimate was that the desk weighed more like 350 pounds. Amazingly, I actually had cleared up the space in this room to fit the 3 ft. by 6 ft. desk.

I really, really, really appreciate the hard labor that Marty and associates put into getting the desk in here, becuase I love it. All my sewing stuff and yarn and fabrics fit nicely in the drawers. It's big enough to have the sewing machine, an ironing station, a cd player, a lamp, and a tv on it all at once without feeling overly crowded.

Our second beroom with all the stuff in it is now our multi-purpose room. It still has our camping stuff (with sleeping bags hanging on the wall), our bicycles, a couch, our bookshelf with books, and extra bedding. It's functional now--multi-functional even. So much better than just overflow storage.