FOUR Room Move

The great room swap began as a simple story....we needed a spot for Brooke and Gabriel joined the Navy and doesn't officially live at home anymore. So, we were going to swap Gabriel's larger room down-stairs for Alyssa to share with Brooke and move his stuff upstairs to the smaller room and use it as a guest room for the time being. The complication arose when my middle aged sons showed me that they were no longer responsible enough to be housed in the basement and desperately needed an upstairs room where their parents could keep much closer tabs on them. To further complicate matters, the "Alyssa turned guest" room upstairs is housed right in between the two girl bathrooms and it doesn't seem like a logical place to put a boys' bedroom. So, I decided to move Elijah, Selah and Bella into that room and James and Ben into the littles' old room, which means Alyssa is still moving into Gabriel's larger room downstairs but Gabriel just moved next door to James and Ben's old room. The added benefit is that we may be able to talk Aunt Deb into temporarily moving into the guest room down-stairs as she prepares to head back to the mission field.

Once the boys "earn" back their down-stairs room by showing me how responsible they are (in a minimum of ONE year), Elijah can then move back into the room he was sharing with the new little girls and have his own room. Did you follow all that?  Maybe some pictures will help - 

This was James and Ben's downstairs bedroom. It had the green paint we wanted, but then some free mismatched green carpet that didn't match. I didn't intend on re-painting it, but it was obviously not an option after moving everything out, especially when I found the area behind the bed that James had made a hole in the wall and dry-walled and painted in with grey concrete paint. (When I got past the sneaky dry-wall part of the story, I asked why he didn't just use the paint that matched, he told me that he thought it did...).

What is remaining from Gabriel is now completely housed in the new guest room closet. I have to either buy new closet doors or a nice curtain, because the boys broke both of those as well.

I painted the guest room a neutral and we laid the Berger carpet that matches upstairs. Granted, this is hardly a decorator dream-room, but I'm going to work on that.

We then moved on to painting Alyssa and Brooke's new room - it's always helpful to have your painting buddy dressed in a dinosaur costume and hanging on your ladder!

I attempted to do the active painting during nap time, so that little Bella didn't end up with too much paint on her.

They were both there, however, for all the prep work. Check out Bella's dance moves.

I will give credit where credit is due. Gabriel's girlfriend, Alayna, helped me paint the guest room and Alyssa helped paint her room. JD laid the carpet in both rooms.

Her new big room ended up very pretty. We still have to get twin beds for her and Brooke as well as new bedding that matches her color scheme. (And fix the window from Gabriel, uh, boys...)

She has a whole Ethiopian art collection from our trip in November that she has been excited to hang, it should make Brooke feel a bit at home.

Alyssa told me that she could just shove her clothes to one end when Brooke comes - I'm thinking I just wish Brooke could wear the same size as Alyssa since Alyssa somehow has so many clothes, but she can't, she's even skinnier than Alyssa.

After the two downstairs bedrooms, I moved up to Alyssa's old small room.

I chose a baby blue to try and match the boy and girl motif; I just have too much green in my house to paint another bedroom green. While I think this is probably the smallest bedroom, the three little guys fit alright. We have been putting Selah in the bottom bunk and Bella in the toddler bed and they are happy with their new arrangement.

I guess I am going to buy Selah the pink owl quilt at Target that matches Bella's toddler bed. I was excited when I saw that Target online has the same pattern in blue and yellow, but when I saw it, I didn't really think it was as cute as the pink and green. 

Finally, yesterday, I moved James and Ben into the sun room. I didn't realize how huge that room really is until we got all the boy's furniture in there. They have a lot of Lego building room are quite happy with the new arrangement. While the sun room is nice and big and light, it just tends to be colder in the winter and warmer in the summer due to all the windows.

It was kind of comical when we thought how we had it perfectly planned whose bedroom was whose when we built the house - TEN of my eleven children have moved bedrooms in the 4.5 years we have lived in this house. We have to be flexible around here!