The Great Room Swap of ‘010

For the past few months William has been getting up at night. A lot. Melissa heard from some of her friends who have babies Will’s age that they sleep better in a separate room. He’s been sleeping in our bedroom downstairs since he was born. We weren’t quite ready to put him in his own room all the way upstairs. After a brief conversation Friday evening we decided that we should move the office downstairs and move our bedroom upstairs right next to his. This way Will could sleep in his own bedroom and we wouldn’t be that far away. The problem is that our bed wouldn’t fit in the office, so we had to move Will’s room into the office and move our room into Will’s room. We basically decided to completely rotate the three bedrooms.

Great, so how do we do this? Each of these rooms has furniture (some if it quite large), and numerous smaller items. Also, Melissa is injured and can’t really carry anything. I arranged for my dad to come over on Sunday to help carry some of the largest items up/down stairs. But given the monumental size of this task I couldn’t wait until Sunday to get it started. All Saturday morning I pondered the best strategy to proceed while Will was napping in the Baby Bjorn strapped around me (which was just the start of a rough day for my back). When he woke up I got going.

Since three rooms would need to be rotated I started with an empty space in one room, moved one piece of furniture in, replaced that piece in the second room with a piece from the third room, then replaced a piece in the third room with a piece from the first room. And so on. Over the next 6-8 hours I disassembled our queen sized bed, a futon, a crib, a dresser, a desk, a filing cabinet, etc. and carried these items up/down stairs by myself. By the end of Saturday I was exhausted and my back was aching, but the move was over half completed.

Today I woke up and ran 12 miles. I took a short break to watch the Olympics 50km Cross Country Ski race. Then my parents arrived and we got to work moving the remaining desk, dresser, filing cabinet, changing table, and numerous smaller items. We got everything moved into the correct rooms. We still have a fair amount of work to go to get all the slightly differently sized closets organized.

We really should have done this move before Will was born, but we thought it would be too much work. Now that it’s (nearly) done I can say that it definitely was a lot of work, but I think it will be totally worth it.