Organizing Makes Me Happy

Josiah is the only one in the house who enjoys his own room. And most of the time, that works out the best for all of us. He, being barely one year old, has different sleeping needs and abilities than the rest of us. We've just found that it works out best to keep the baby of the family in the Baby Room until someone else comes along and needs to sleep in it.

In our cozy, three bedroom house, this means that the older three, who are 6, almost 5 and 3 share their room. The Big Kid Room. While I enjoy many aspects of this arrangement; the sibling friendships that are developing and less "MY room" and more "OUR room" talk between them all, their room is extremely tight. And the furniture has been poorly arranged by the adults in this home.

This is what it looked like until last Saturday afternoon:


No, it's not "to scale" but let's just say that only one child at a time can get dressed in this room.
And that's partly due to some training issues and some bad habits but on Saturday, Bob and I were ready to make some changes to facilitate better habits for the future!

We began after the kids had taken some liberties with Mercy's mattress during Saturday Morning Chore Time. I heard words like "slide" and "fort" and then saw this mess:


Well, Bob wasn't part of the mess. No, he is part of the solution!

So Bob headed out to the workshop to build some supports for Mercy's bed that would give us some more storage space beneath it. I think he got to use his router. Here she is post-bath tonight. Beneath her, you can see two shoe bins and a plastic drawer labled "PullUps".


I wish I had a "Before" picture of the closet because it was a giant pit of dysfunction. There were two bars, one low for Mercy's clothes and one high for boys' church clothes with a shelf in the middle. The dresser created just enough of a secluded spot that many a child used the closet floor for a hiding place, knocking Mercy's dresses off their hangers. Mess, mess, mess and plenty of "I can't find my shoes!"

So the shelf and lower bar came out as did all the messes from the floor. Bob scooted the dresser into the closet and a little set of plastic drawers was reappropriated from toy storage to become underwear and sock drawers.

Now it looks like this:



And just for fun, here's the boys' side of the room at bedtime tonight:

I would love to hear any ideas for using small spaces well. Josiah's room is next on the closet-reorganization list!