The Monster 6-Room Tackle

August 6, 2007 by Susan

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Yes, between our two houses, we’re redecorating 6 rooms!

Hey Ladies, this is Susan here…

Janice is again away and I am here trying to tackle. Hopefully this is Janice’s last trip until the babies have arrived and learned to sit-up and crawl! (Well, maybe not quite sitting and crawling… her husband does tend to like to take their family away for long weekends and even a newborn may not stop that. But, I’ll tell myself that at least… Life is tougher for me when she’s away.)

Anyway, in last week’s tackle, Janice wrote about how she’s converting the office space upstairs in her house into Jackson’s new bedroom.

Well, that is actually only part of a much larger tackle that is going on around here.

Between Janice’s house and my house, we are actually redecorating 6 Rooms!

Here’s what’s happening…

At Janice’s house:

We’re getting rid of the old office that is no longer used and building a new room for Jackson. That new room obviously needs decorating and new furniture.
Converting Jackson’s room into a nursery for her new baby. Again new furniture, bedding etc.
Building a new room in her basement playroom area into a room for her new Au Pair. Again new furniture, bedding etc.

At Susan’s house:

We’re moving our office (where my mom spends most of her time managing customer service for our stores) down to our basement. Currently our basement is a spare room that also has become a catch-all storage area. It’s actually a ground floor room that is quite large and opens to our patio, so it’s not like we’re sending our mom to a dungeon or anything. It will be twice as large as our current office space.
But for this room, we have to hire a contractor to build a door since it’s currently just an open room. (The sound of screaming babies and children doesn’t make good background noise when you’re on the phone with a customer.) We’re also pulling out the carpet and putting in laminate flooring. And again more furniture is needed as we’re adding a second desk and workspace.
Converting our existing office into a bedroom for our Au Pair. Again new furniture, bedding etc.
Finally, we’re modifying Julia’s nursery into a combined room with a crib for the new baby and an extra bed for whoever ends up sleeping there. Julia never actually slept in her nursery as she co-sleeps with us. But, I think we may try to have the new baby sleep in a crib and have either Rob or me sleep in the spare bed there to look after her in the early months. Who knows what will actually happen with our sleep arrangements… but we thought we’d try this plan. But again… more furniture and bedding etc.

If you noticed in that list, each room requires new furniture and bedding… yikes… costly and time consuming.

So, my mom and I spent the last two days at IKEA getting the necessities to equip all these rooms.

We were quite a sight… I wish I’d had a camera with me.

My mom messed up her ankle about a month ago and she still can’t really walk. So she was in a wheelchair with Julia either riding on her lap or running ahead wearing her teddy bear harness pulling the wheelchair while I pushed. We told her she was the engine of the train. She had so much fun. (She wasn’t exactly ‘pulling’ much, but she thought she was.)

Julia was a star shopper. We were out for 8 hours on Saturday — she even missed her nap — and she never cried or fussed once. Then on Sunday we had to return to finish the job.

We managed to figure out and purchase most of the furniture and some of the bedding. We found a good bed for Jackson too, but we didn’t purchase that yet as Janice and he will have to check it out first.

So… part of the monster 6-room tackle is done. But oh… there is so much left. And I’m sure Janice will tell you more in next week’s tackle.

But enough about us… What are you tackling? Link up and let us know.

Join Us For Tackle It Tuesday

We’re making housework blog-able!

Each week on Tuesday, we are posting before and after pictures of a project or trouble area that we tackled this week.

The project can be little or big – whatever you want. Basically, Tackle It Tuesday is about giving ourselves incentive, deadlines and satisfaction in getting our household tasks done. (It doesn’t even have to be housework… just whatever is on your To Do list.)

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About Susan

Susan Carraretto and her identical twin, Janice Croze, created 5 Minutes for Mom in 2006. Susan loves all social media, but her top addiction these days is Pinterest.