bedroom 4 underway

So, Bedroom 4. This is where we are.

I'm not really sure when we started this room. it was before Baby was born... she's 8 weeks today (can't believe it)... so maybe, 12 weeks ago? Needless to say, it took a back seat when she arrived. Sam has been able to work on it some in the last 2 months, but our hopes for busting this room out quickly are pretty much gone. we'll just do what we can and hopefully it'll get done before Christmas. anything is better than it was!

The first thing we started with in this room was the closet. Flashback to the closet "before"...



So pretty.

I can tell this photo was taken just a few months after moving in. for one thing, we still had the toad cage. our pet american toad didn't fare too well in a December move, though. cold-blooded and all that. both toady and the cage are long gone now. I can also tell because the kids are sitting there watching a video. the t.v. was in this room for a while because the family room was all torn up - waiting to get its pee carpet replaced. ah, good times. good times.

the original closet configuration was bizarre. like many things in the house. you just wonder who on earth did the layout design. someone with an aversion to symmetry, i can tell you that much. (excuse the lack of capitals, by the way. i'm often doing something else with one hand. makes the shift key a little tricksy). anyway, the closet is a great size - the whole length of the room - but it had over 2 feet of basically unusable space on either end. the doors only went over so far, and to access the end spaces, you had to lean in reeeeaaalllly far and push a bunch of stuff out of the way first. bad design. sam and i spent no less than 3 straight hours one afternoon brainstorming our plans for this room. should we move the closet entirely? make two separate ones? where would beds go if we did move it? what was the absolute best use of space for our family? for all these GIRLS?!

i tried to grab a quick shot the other day, but i had the 50mm lens on the camera. if i remember correctly, i was snapping this in between one of Baby's naps and a feeding... no time to run downstairs and grab a better lens!!! ha ha.



this is what we came up with in the end. two closets side by side.

it looks like no more than 2 girls will share this room at any given time. so, two separate closets with all the space available (hello, 2 ft. on each end!) seemed like a decent route to take.



sam riped out the front, non-loadbearing wall and got to work framing out the closets. i don't know. he did this maybe in July?



i think the photo above is a few weeks after Baby came along. Sam may have gotten the new wiring done then, too. he moved an outlet when the wall came down and he wired things up so that both closets have an overhead light now.

within the last 4-5 weeks or so, he's started putting up and mudding the new drywall.

so, this is the progress so far.



the next step is to finish up the mudding... which is very messy... the sanding part. BUT Baby is faaar away from all that when daddy's sanding. everything's well ventilated. pinky promise. then, I think he's planning on getting the shelving cut. that way i can start priming and painting the shelves (which takes a while) while he works on getting the doors in. once those two things are done, the final steps will go pretty quickly.

there you go! slowly but surely we'll keep plugging away at it. next thing you know, we'll have another room down.

have a great one!