What I've Been Up To THIS Month..... where it all begins

Every year in both the spring and the fall we clean our big, ole' house top to bottom. Due to jobs and such, it takes us several months to get this all done, as we have 3 rooms, a bath and a hallway upstairs and 8 rooms, a bath, a double level storage room and the porch downstairs. It's a big house, and I love it to death but weekly cleaning only takes you so far, and eventually you need to get out the bucket and rags and give it a good scrubbing. One weekend several weeks ago, we set out do our "weekly room" and I decided we should do the guest room. The guest room is a fast/easy clean as it contains mostly walls that needed washing, windows and blinds that needed cleaning and bedding that needed washing plus a few things that needed washing down. Piece of cake, we could do it an afternoon.

We got in there, and I asked The Boy what he thought was under the rug. See, for sometime now I've been thinking our guest room is a colossal waste of space. Granted, my SIL has lived with us 2x now and stayed in there, and Ms. Thang lived in there while we renovated her bedroom, and my mom stays in there when she comes to visit.. but that's once a year and really do we need a whole big room housing a huge bed for that? I think not. I stood there, looking, and thinking.. and I could see him getting nervous a bit. I walked into the kids playroom, which now that they are teens is mostly just an "use the computer and pile all our crap so we don't have to bring it to our rooms" room... and thought some more. After about 5 minutes, he said, "What are you thinking about?" and out of my mouth came, "What do you think about moving the kids computer into your office and turning that into the radio room, having this room be "our" office that we share, and the guest room becoming my craft room?"

We both were quiet for a few minutes. I didn't even know that was where I was going, but I guess that thought had been in there brewing for some time and wanted to have it's day in the limelight. We talked about it a bit, and walked around the rooms thinking.. and then The Boy took his knife out of his pocket, peeled up a corner of the rug, and said, "There is painted wood floor under here". That was all it took. We washed the bedding to be saved for an air mattress, we hauled the bed frame and mattress out to the barn, we pulled all the rest of the stuff out of the room, and then took out the bottom trim and pulled up the rug. It took an afternoon and we were faced with a rug-less room that already looked 100% better. We spent the rest of that afternoon moving some furniture to other parts of the house, which then in turn had us rearrange some rooms a little bit, and in the end I am very pleased with how that all turned out.

At first I didn't want to paint the room. I wasn't crazy about the color of the walls, as they always looked much more pink that the color I picked out that day, but the more I was in there.. the more I hated the color. I spent a lot of time thinking about 2 room colors that would flow side by side in those two rooms that flow into each other with no door in between, and the inspiration for the wall colors came from a pitcher my mom gave us when she left for the nunnery. But that's a post for another day.