Musical Furniture

In the Zavala house we've been playing a bit of "Musical Furniture" in the past 2 months - a take off of musical chairs but with all the furniture in our house. We've lived in this house for going on nine years, and have been through all different stages of life in it.

We began as newlyweds (married for a little over a year) in our first house. I was still in college and Mark was working, so we didn't spend a lot of time "home making". The house was a mismatched collection of college years, wedding gifts, and cheap items we'd found.

When I graduated and went to work, the additional income allowed us to make a few more purchases - we made the upstairs room into a game room complete with a pool/casino game table and red and black walls. We added a few decorations, but not much. Most of our time was spent at work.

Then we got pregnant with Hayden and I turned the spare room into a nursery (with lavender walls - before we knew the gender). The nursery then exploded and threw up all over our house - making it unmistakable that we were new parents. Swings in the living room, toys littering the floors, changing mats everywhere, little shirts and socks lining the couch - it was a sight.

When Corbin came, in true second child style, we threw him in the game room and just lived in survival mode with two children under two.

Only in the last few months have we looked up from the diapers and sippy cups to see a disheveled and crazy house, with no organization or reason. We've just been trudging along and not stopping to think about why we put things where we did.

It was time for a change.

Our first change came with the boys. With the largest room in the house being the "game room", we decided that it would be perfect for the boys. We moved Hayden's things upstairs and sectioned off a part of the room as "his". We dismantled the pool table and shoved all the unused items to one side of the room (the idea being that we would move or get rid of it all in time).

This allowed us to use Hayden's old room as an office. Now Mark and I can use our computers without waking the boys at night (they were previously located in the loft next to the game room), and it allows Mark to "shut the door" when he's working from home and keep the boys out of his way.

Then came the living room. We finally got those bookshelves/entertainment unit we'd been looking at for over a year. Wow! This has given us so much more space. Now there is finally a place to put my massive book collection, all of our DVDs (or dvdv's as Hayden calls them), and electronic equipment. This has been the best purchase we've ever made for the house in my opinion. I'm still in the process of "filling it up", but so far it has been wonderful!!

Motivated to continue

Seeing how just a couple of changes have impacted our lives, I'm eager to make more! I have ideas to help organize our bedroom, as well as our closets, and even our garage. I can see how having too much stuff, or just plain unorganized stuff has been draining us. It's more to clean, more to look through, more to organize, just MORE. And right now in my life, I want LESS.

How about you? Have you gotten the organizational bug? How has organizing an area of your life improved it? Or what do you wish you could get organized and how do you think it would improve your life?