Moving on up....but not to the east side...

Jarrett and I continue to be amazed at the amount of "stuff" that comes along with having children.  When we looked at homes more than 5 years ago, we always planned for extra space for children.  Now looking back, we had no idea what we were doing when we planned for "extra" space for them.  Turns out, now that we have two boys and all that comes with having kids, somedays it seems we need almost a whole another home just to store stuff.

Turns out we've already run out of room.  If you come to our house, I warn you to never open up a closet, a drawer or heaven forbid... our office doors.  It seems we have everything full to the brim and I won't even bring up the topic of the attaic again.  Jarrett and I have been brainstorming what we can get rid of and how we can clean out our clutter, but after hours of debate, when I suggest we cut down the number of books in his "library" and he suggests I get rid of all of my scrapbook stuff, we throw up the white flag and just settle with the fact that the stuff will have to stay. 

Being that we, along with millions of other American's purchased our home in the middle of a real estate bubble/disaster/nightmare/"the list could go on" we are stuck in our home for at least the next 26 years (but whose counting). So we began to brainstorm different ways to better use our limited space.  One solution we came up with was changing the boy's bedroom and bunking up their beds.  When we asked the boys about what they thought of the idea, they loved it!

Two weeks ago  Jarrett and I tackeled the project of bunking their beds (yes, I am writing this correctly).  It seemed originally like a simple project.  We learned quickly, nothing with us, is that simple.  Turns out that after we paid extra to have the beds assembled on site (literally after the boys had already moved in with us back in May 2010), we carefully placed the extra bolts, screws and pieces in a careful place as to make sure we would remember where we were storing them until the day came when we decided to bunk their beds.  Turns out, we put all of the necessary pieces in such a careful place, we can't remember, let alone find where we stored them.  So back to the furniture store Jarrett went to reorder all of the pieces for the entire bed assembly.  On the bright side, if the boys ever break a nut or bolt holding the bed together, we now have a spare (that is unless we can't remember where we store our second back up set). :-)

Finally this past Friday, the pieces arrived and we started the project of assembling the extra pieces to put one bed ontop of the other.  An hour and a half into the project, and after several discussions about why the pieces weren't matching up correctly, we discovered our expert bed assembly folks, yes the ones we paid extra to assemble, weren't exactly experts on installation.  Turns out they assembled the beds incorrectly and so Jarrett and I had to take both beds complete apart and then begin to put them back together, this time the correct way. 

And now finally, after what seems like a marathon project, we are happy to announce that the boy's room is now holding more of their "stuff" and our living room is back to resembling something that should look like a place to live rather than a storage room for toys.  Yay! We finally got the beds together...

And the boys are excited beyond belief.  Gabriel feels like he's on the top of the world and Michael has his own cave-like bed. 

Here's hoping boys don't accumulate more stuff the older they get or were going to run out of options to move on up... with a single story home, there's only so far you can move up.

Until next time,
Angie