rearrange my bedroom

Geez, I hadn’t realized it’s been half a year since I made any progress on this goal.

Well, stuff has happened, but not progress.

I have worked hard to clean the rest of my house. I rearranged my dining room and living room and sewing area. In order to do all that, I ended up basically dumping random boxes of stuff into my bedroom just to get it out of the way until I could get around to dealing with it.

So now most of the house looks fine, but I can hardly walk in my bedroom. I’ve been sleeping on the couch. I guess it’s been that way for a couple of months now.

God, it’s amazing what you can make yourself accept as normal.

I am ashamed of myself. This isn’t okay. I need to have a useable bedroom, and I need to sleep in my own bed. The couch is cramped, and I don’t sleep well through the night. And it’s not private. And it just seems low-class somehow not to have a bed I can sleep in.

I’ve got the dresser moved.

Next project: try on everything in my closet and sort out the crap.

I got my bed moved, and all made up prettily, and I slept in it last night (instead of on the couch as usual)! My son decided it was so pretty he wanted to sleep there too. It was a little crowded, but cozy.

I’m so glad my little boy is still little enough to want to sleep with Mommy sometimes!

This morning I even made the bed up immediately after rising. It is so gorgeous I could just sigh!

This was more work than I expected. I’m incredibly proud that I got this far in one day. It turns out that there were two or three big piles/baskets of junk that I had to move and sort through in order to move the bed. I hadn’t even thought about those piles. Jeez. I really let myself slump down pretty far, there.

When I moved the bed away from the wall I found that black mold had grown in the corner. EWWWW! Nasty things had also fallen down under my bed. I felt like I’d been sleeping in a sewer. I felt totally disgusted that I’d let it get that bad.

I cleaned up all the mold, vacuumed the carpet, vacuumed the mattress, changed and washed all the sheets in hot water and bleach. Made the bed up again, and revelled in the fresh, clean smell of my beautiful bed! It feels so good to know that the carpet under my bed is as clean as the sheets on top of it, too!

I hadn’t noticed what a musty old smell my bedroom had developed. I just got used to it, day after day. Now I smell the freshness of clean sheets. It inspires me to do more!

I still have that big folding table to clear off. I bet I’ll find untold treasures lurking there amid the junk. Stuff I haven’t looked at for a long time. Stuff I forgot how much I loved it. Stuff I just put there “for only a moment” while I was busy doing something else, and which got lost in the general energy-sucking blobbiness of the clutter monster.

I still have that dresser to move also. It’s big and heavy (made of solid wood), and the drawers are filled with junk already. I’ve got to find a place to put all that stuff, then rededicate it to serving my room. I think I may even line the drawers with pretty scented paper. I think it’s time to honor my underwear and socks. They do a hard job every day and don’t get much appreciation. I think I’ll treat this like some kind of homecoming celebration, and act like I really CARE how my drawers look, because they are there to serve ME, and reflect the dignity I feel.

My bedroom has been a wreck for a couple of years. I’m embarrassed if anyone sees it.

I’ve decided that though I can’t afford to buy new furniture, it might all look better if I chose a more functional and flattering arrangement. Besides, rearranging will force me to clean up all the piles of clothes and stuff which have drifted into the corners of my room.

I actually decided to start working on this about a month ago. So far I’ve managed to move three useless, cluttering pieces of furniture out of my room. (A small couch, a TV stand, and a large chair.) They’re now functioning very nicely in my daughter’s bedroom. I took a big folding table out of her room, and used it to replace a small folding table I’d been using before. I needed the extra space. I also managed to eliminate a mountain of clutter in the center of my room. (Though honestly, most of it is now on top of that big table. One battle at a time!)

Right now my (twin-sized) bed is pushed up alonside the wall, and I have no dresser or bedside tables. I’m going to rotate my bed so it fills the center of my room, and bring in a tall dresser which right now is cluttering my dining room. (I put it there origionally because I thought it’d make a nice place to put placemats and stuff. WRONG! It’s nothing but a general junk catchall there.)

I had thought when I first arranged my bedroom the way it has been that it would be nice to have “all that open space in the center of the room” to make me feel “uncluttered and free”. I must have some psychological need to not see too much open space, though, because not long after I arranged my room that way a huge pile of junk began accumulating in that “open space”. I walked around that pile of junk (a chair, small round table, plastic drawers, few baskets, and whatever clothes and blankets I felt like tossing on top) for several years and never moved it.

I’m going to quit trying to be so clever. I’m going to move my dresser back in the bedroom instead of trying to be so all-fired creative that I use it in a room it was never meant for. I’m going to actually have a place to put socks and underwear instead of just tossing them on the floor of my closet.

I’ve already moved in a bookshelf, which I needed very badly because I read a lot. I’ve also already gotten rid of the whole “center-of-the-room mountain”. The next step is to vacuum that carpet space well (first time in years) and move the bed. Then I’ll finish clearing out all the rest of the piles around the place, and move in the dresser.

Getting the bed moved, the piles cleared, and dresser in place will create a huge feeling of freedom and lightness in my room. I’ll make up my bed with my prettiest sheets and blankets, and I know it will all be beautiful. At least for a while. Until the eddies of clutter currents find their new whirlpools, and stuff starts drifting into the new “dead” spots.

I know I’m going to miss having my bed beside the wall. I liked the feeling of security, and the ability to lean against the wall while I read or slept. I think having a place to put a new dresser will make up for it, though.

The “feng shui” aspect of this rearrangement is that right now I’m thinking I’d like to get involved romantically with a man. For years I’ve been nursing a broken heart from my last (very bad) breakup, and having my bed one-sided and my bedroom unapproachable felt appropriate (if not dignified). Now I’m making (metaphorical) room for another person to enter my life. Though my bed is actually too small for two, and I wouldn’t want to start sleeping with him right away anyhow, I know that the principals of feng shui say that my old bedroom reflected a single status, and my new arrangement will better reflect my willingness to not be single anymore.

It’s alot like tetris. Eventually you get it right though.

can you believe it’s been months since I mad the first move of the furiture in my room and my dresser still has been parked in the dead center of the room.
the “sub-goal” for this project is to buy a laptop computer to rid my huge PC that is keeping my desk in the spot where my dresser belongs.
time to finance the computer – the desk should be history in the next few months – I just have to get my ducks ($$) in a row!

I realized all too soon that I should have measured furniture before moving it! I have one too many pieces of furniture and I am in a bind. It was as though a puzzle has been disassembled – but want my room to look nice – and not like a sardine can – stuffed with furniture bordering my entire room. We shall see how this works out – I may have to take a car load of stuff to goodwill. The worst is over of the mess – now it’s time to find all my belongings a home.

All it takes is that first move and the mission has started. After moving a ton of stuff to vacuum my room, I made the big move. Moving my bed first and foremost, I knew I needed at least a place to sleep. That was number one in my books in starting the change and number two was access to my bathroom – the shower, toilet and closet. Check, check and check. But my dresser is now in the dead center of the room with piles and piles of books, frames, cds, blankets, clothes, photos, bags, knick-knacks, patty-wacks, you name it, you’ll find it on my floor or in piles on some piece of furniture. Lamps are all on the floor. Mission for the weekend: to tackle this room project and find everything I own a “home”. It’s ten billion times worse in my room from where I started but the good news is, this is the half way point – it only gets cleaner from here!

I want to make my master bedroom look like it has more space.

It’s a new look, not really a new bedroom. My bed is now sandwiched between my new writing desk and the new book shelf, both from IKEA. It feels great and I love how I’m sleeping next to all my books.

Still tired from all the hard work, but I’m pleased as cheese. :)