transformation

Hey everyone! How’s it going?

It was my birthday on Saturday and Mr. Lifeology and our friends made it very memorable and wonderful. It started off on Friday when we went to the Keg – steak, a bottle of wine and finished off with coffee and Kaluha. The next day we went shopping and bought pyjamas, shoes and a cocktail shaker (I’ve always wanted one of those – hahaha). Also bought the futon, which we still have to put together, and a few things for the bathroom and our linen. More about that later.

That evening our friends had an End of Summer Party at their farm and, as you can see, a good time was had by all.

I must admit to being a little under the weather the next day, but not so much that I couldn’t continue working on the house to make room for the kids and grandchild.

Mr. Lifeology had to go to work, so we didn’t manage to put the futon together. That will be done this week. But we had the cable guy show up on Sunday to move the cable boxes and modems around to accommodate everyone. We moved our TV from Mr. Lifeology’s man cave (which is to be the kids’ bedroom) to our bedroom, and the little yellow chair we upcycled went in there also.

We will be moving the mirror and adding 2 bookshelves.

Since the top of the wardrobe is being taken up by the TV, there’s no place anymore for our jewelry boxes which used to be there. Mr. Lifeology solved that problem by putting up 2 crates on the walls to act as shelving

We set up the kids’ TV in their new living room and added a chair from the former man cave.

The linen cupboard (which used to be in what is now Neil’s room) is now a wardrobe in our bedroom, which means we now had nowhere to put our linen. So we bought a folding shelving unit and hung it in the kids’ living room closet.

Some of the towels will go on the shelf above it and some of the towels have been put on a shelving unit we bought for the bathroom

We also bought another bathroom caddy to hold everyone’s stuff

That’s as far as I got before I had to go and lie down due to a rather strange headache 🙂

See you next week for the finished product of our house transformation.

Cheers

Jane

Well, here’s a challenge… my son, his wife (common-law) and their 1 year old son, Neil, my grandson, are moving in with us! My son wants to go back to school and so, to save money, they are moving back to Vancouver from Edmonton and into our house. With us.

And so at the end of this month, our house is expanding from two people to 5. Yikes!

We live in a 3 1/2 bedroom town house. It’s pretty spacious, but in order to make this work for a year or two without us all living on top of each other and driving each other completely round the bend, we decided to try as much as possible to give each family their own living space. Of course, the downstairs living area will be for all of us to live in and spend time in – eat, cook, play, watch TV, entertain – but I do believe that each of us will still need our own space. A place where couples can spend time together. Alone with each other. A place to have private conversations, or arguments or whatever. So we are turning one of the bedrooms into a living room for them, and the small den into a bedroom for little Neil. Thank goodness we decluttered a lot of stuff when we moved here, but it’s still a challenge finding a place for 3 rooms of stuff. One of the rooms is a library/man cave for Mr. Lifeology. When he was a long-haul truck driver, he accumulated a lot of books over a 25-year span and now those books are on bookshelves across every wall in that room. Most of those now will be packed away and put into our storage space. Two of the shelves will go into our bedroom.

In order to clear the upstairs room to turn it into a living room, we had to rearrange the downstairs living area to accommodate everything.

First of all, we bought a love seat. We already had a couch, an armchair and a small chair in this space, but we felt we needed more seating in order to accommodate a bigger family. We found this love seat at a thrift store for $80! It was perfect!

Floyd, the ball python, had her home in the soon-to-be-living-room, so she had to come downstairs. We found that her tank fitted perfectly in the dining area

To make space for Floyd, we had to move our green glass cabinet from that space to this little alcove in the hallway

And the antique treadle sewing machine that was in that space was moved next to the armchair by the window.

After moving a few ornaments from the floor by the fireplace up onto the mantle and away from little fingers, our downstairs living-room transformation is complete and I LOVE it!

After that, we moved the cat litter and food to here

And made some space in the hallway closet

We made a start on the upstairs space. Mr. Lifeology picked up a lot of their things a couple of weeks ago on a trip to Edmonton, and we put it all in the new upstairs living-room. In a week or two, we’ll be buying a futon for that room, but for now it looks like this

We cleared the room that will be Neil’s. Our neighbours gave us a toddler bed for free, which was amazing. We decided to put the dresser that was in our bedroom, into Neil’s bedroom, and move the linen cupboard that was in that room, into our bedroom and use it for our clothes. The linen will find a new home in the upstairs living-room closet. This is what we have in here so far. Not bad, huh?