Trading Spaces

My Little Guy is getting bigger every day. We’ve recently been discussing moving him from his nursery into what has (until now) been the “spare bedroom”. It’s roomier, has a much larger closet and a door which shuts. You may think all bedrooms have doors, but you would be wrong.

Our little house is fun and quirky. One of its many quirks is that former owners wanted to turn what had been a perfectly normal (albeit small) third bedroom into a sitting room of sorts for the master bedroom. To achieve this, they cut a huge arch doorway into the wall that had separated the two rooms. For whatever reason, they also removed the door to the hallway from the smaller of the two rooms. That is, you can still walk through the door. There’s just nothing to close behind you. We looked all over for the missing door when we first moved in, assuming it might be stashed in the attic or basement. No luck. And its narrower than your average door, which means we need to order a custom replacement.

Not exactly the door we need, but close...

Since our earliest days in this house, we’ve made plans to do something about this. At some point we’ll probably wall up that arch and order a door. For now though, it’s served perfectly as a nursery. We hung a set of curtains over the archway, and another where a door normally would lead into the hallway. When the curtains are pulled aside, Little guy loves running round the round-about that the arch between the two rooms (and the two regular doors into the hall) creates.

Right now, he’s satisfied to stay in his crib when he wakes at 4am. He yells for me until I arrive at his side, all blurry-eyed and catatonic. We fear that he’ll soon learn to climb out though, and that we might not wake up right away. After all, we don’t particularly enjoy getting up before dawn like he does, and if it weren’t for his insistent yelling, we’d probably sleep till 5:30 or later.

Our thought is that if we have a door we can close, we can hang a bell on it or rig an alarm or do something to alert us when he leaves the room.  That way, we can follow him or heard him back to bed or whatever.

So, the other day I asked Little Guy, “What would you think if we moved your bed and your toys and your books into that room?” I pointed to the room across the hall and he stroked his little chin with his thumb and forefinger (new thing he does when he’s “thinking”… it’s utterly adorable).

“My Bed?” he asked.

“Yes, we’d put your bed in there and all of your other things too.”

He wriggled out of my arms and ran into the spare bedroom. He vaulted up to the top of the queen bed that we keep there, got under the covers so that only his little face was peeking out and said, “My bed!”

Okay, so clearly we have some more explaining to do, but I feel good about the fact that he’s at least open to change. In the coming weeks, I’ll keep you up to date as we re-do his new room. I’m pretty excited to get him into a bigger space, and also to do something with his old room. We might have another baby someday (and would use the little doorless room as a nursery again), but until then…. I’m thinking that room would make a wonderful sewing/craft space! 

Must finish this off as we're off to the local hardware store to look at paint swatches.  Don't you just love paint swatches? 
 
Yay.  I heart redecorating!