The Learning Umbrella

Well, my sister-in-law is going to be moving in with us for awhile.  She had been working on a cruise ship, and my husband just helped her get a job in his department.  Luckily the office is close to our house, because she doesn’t have a car (and we only have 1).  Their hours won’t be the same, so they can’t always carpool.

So – how am I going to find room for an adult woman to sleep here with some privacy?  There goes our “study”!  It’s really ok, since that room needed to be rethought anyway.

My plan (it’s a bit complicated):

1.  move all the kids’ toys out of their closet, into our garage.

2.  Move their dressers into their closet, and all the coats from the coat closet.

3.  Now, with the space their dressers used to take up, put our larger desk and the snake tank into the kids’ bedroom.

4.  Put shelves in the back of the coat closet, and store all the school/craft/art/daycare puzzles and games in there.

5.  Get myself a sweet-looking fold-away rolling sewing table, store my notions in the drawers, and tuck that into a corner somewhere when I’m not using it.  The corner in question has not been selected – it may end up sitting in the garage too.

6.  Move the computer onto the smaller, rolling desk we own, and set it in a corner of my kitchen.  Where the printers will go, we still haven’t decided.  There is a vote from my husband for the whole operation to get set up in the garage, but I’m not sure.  We are getting a wireless hub, so I could theoretically get online from my laptop, anywhere in the house.  In that case, I don’t really care where the big computer is.

7.  Get rid of the 3rd desk from the study – my great grandfather “built” it from salvaged parts – but we have another desk he built, and other family stuff, and this is the poorest quality and least useful of the desks.  With my family, if I couldn’t get rid of anything that was a “family piece” I’d have to just keep building a bigger house – there’s more stuff about to trickle down when my grandparents move into assisted living, too.

8.  That leaves in the room: a cat scratch post (tuck it anywhere – laundry room?), a chair (maybe she’ll want that), a file cabinet (too heavy – it’s staying put), bookshelves with our books (also staying put), and various hanging on the walls shelves covered with books and computer stuff.  We don’t have a bed for her, but she’ll figure out something.  We do have Carbon in a double, and we’ve been wanting to get a set of twin bunk beds instead, so this might be the impetus to bump that higher on the priority list for spending money.

Complicated, but overall, I think this plan will work to make another bedroom here, and not lose too much function for our other stuff.  In fact, there may even be more function, having my school and daycare supplies in that closet off the living room!

I’ll take pictures of the final results.