Domestic Duties

We talked about turning the downstairs around for a while.

I asked J when we returned from camp, "Do you think this is realistically going to happen, or not?" She said that she thought it would, and then it ended up happening that very night. What happened was this: We set up my library, the piano, and the desk in the front room of our house, which we ended up calling The Library, The Front Room, and The Living Room at various points. In the back room, we set up our two couches and the cube which housed toys for the boys downstairs. We called this The Family Room, The Living Room (you can see the confusion that arose from this arrangement already) and The Back Room.

There were some decent reasons for this arrangement. The back room is carpeted, the front room is not. The back room has big windows on three sides and is full of light, while the front room can be a little darker and more subdued.

But there were reasons to switch as well. J didn't like my bookshelves to be the initial sight upon entering the house, and with good reason--there isn't a matching pair among them, even the pair that is supposed to match, and many of my books are, well, more functional than beautiful. We also found that the back room was hard to keep clean, mostly because it felt too small. There was only a small carpeted area left when the two couches were in there, and James would immediately cover the whole surface of the room with toys upon getting up every morning. (On particularly difficult evenings when we didn't pick up after him he could just continue working on the previous days' mess without having to empty all his toy boxes for a fresh one.)

Attempting the room switch on Sunday night might have been foolish. We're both 30 now, after all, and at any moment we could pass by our moment of physical prime into the long, slow descent of old age. We had just arrived back from two weeks at camp the night before, the boys had both been horribly out of sorts all day, and the house was already in a state of near disaster. I brewed the rare pot of 8 PM coffee and began to pull books off shelves, stacking them perilously against the wall. We agreed to work to 11, and then we'd stop, no matter what was done or undone.

J took the opportunity to work on something else we'd talked about--reducing the toy content of the cube by about 20%. If James had 10 matchbox cars, we threw 2 of them in a box headed for the basement. If Owen had 5 stuffed friends, we retired one of them. We put away puzzles, threw out card games, and generally attempted to declutter our lives a bit. (It's amazing how much junk you pick up when you have kids.) That part went well, although there was trouble a few days later when James saw me emptying the vacuum filter into the trash bin and noticed that we'd chucked out Don't Spill the Beans. "Hey," he said "why'd you throw out Don't Spill the Beans? Are you going to throw it away." I noticed his hurt expression, remembered the wisdom of my earlier conversations with J, reflected for a few seconds about living more contentedly with fewer material possessions, and told him in a gentle and wise voice: "I guess you'll have to ask Mommy."

Once all the shelves were stripped bare and the toys had been resorted, we began to move pieces around. First we tried to move my desk (which is called "my" desk, but is really J's) into the corner. At this point we'd unloaded eight shelves of my library, excavated the furniture, moved the entire dining room into the kitchen (to clear a path for moving) and there was no going back.

"It looks awful," said J.
She was right. The desk fit horribly in the spot where we'd moved it, and the only other sensible spot would mean that we didn't have enough wall-space for the two largest bookshelves.
We tried angling the desk, and it looked even worse.

"Well, this is the nicest piece of furniture in the library. We have to make this look good, even if nothing else will."

We moved it against the back wall, and it looked better.
Then we hauled in the two tall bookshelves, and began experimenting. As the tape measure had previously confirmed, they didn't fit anywhere. I was almost to the point of suggesting that we move them to the basement when J had a stroke of genius: She tipped one of them on its side, and laid it underneath the big casement windows. We had to remove a little hardware to make it work, but the effect was striking, and the shelves look much better sideways than they ever did standing up. It opened up all sorts of additional wallspace, and gave nice long surfaces under the window for additional storage. Moving in the rest of shelves was no problem after that.

There was more trouble when we attempted to move the couches into the front room, though.
We tried the blue couch against the red wall and the brown couch against the white wall. It looked bad. So we tried the blue couch against the white wall and the brown couch against the red wall, and that looked even worse. We moved the blue couch out of the room and tried to find a place for just the brown couch. That looked bad too. I should say, by the way, that at some point an evil witch put an enchantment on both of the couches so that they grew heavier each time we picked them up. By the time we were finishing up (nearly eleven o'clock, the very witching hour of the night) we could hardly get them off the floor.

We ended up throwing out the brown couch. It sat on the curb for three days this week while we hoped for someone with a pick-up and a need for an ugly couch would come by, but I ended up breaking down yesterday morning and calling the trash company. (James still thinks "it's going to another family that needs a couch.") It served us well, that couch, for the last few years. But no matter where we moved it in the house, there was a basic problem with it--it was as ugly a piece of furniture as you'll ever see.

J didn't love the way the blue couch looked either, but she worked in the front room as the clock ticked towards eleven, and I took laundry-baskets full of books from one room to another.

We were done by 11:15, and all the furniture was moved from one room to another.

We even found Lightning McQueen, James' adored little red car which had been missing for a month. I snuck upstairs before I went to sleep and put it on his bed next to his pillow. The next morning James woke up to find Lightning next to him and excitedly showed George. I was about to get in the shower when I heard his voice calling from downstairs.

"Roy!!! Hey ROY!!!!"

I poked my head out of the bathroom door.

"James, are you trying to tell me something?"

"Hey, why'd you move all your books into the Family room? George says he doesn't like it. George says you need to move them all back, okay?"

Well, George may not like it, but we think it turned out pretty well.