Snips and Snails and Puppydog Tails

Don’t judge; we all have a “junk something” – junk drawer in the kitchen or bedroom, a junk bucket at the foot of the stairs or in a spare room…you know, a place that holds all the stuff you don’t have a better place for, but can’t fathom getting rid of yet. Well, in our house, it was the dining room. Yes, I said the dining room. We haven’t had a dining set in there in a long time, and the room has long been wasted space. It’s really too small for the type of formal dining set I’d like, and its location is less than convenient to the food prep/serve area in our kitchen. So it became the “staging area” and then just flat-out Junk Room. No, really, it was so full of stuff that it gave me a headache to look at it. Oh, and did I mention it’s the first room you see in the house? Yeah…we’re classy like that.

Bryan and I have talked for quite some time about turning the dining room into our office, but we hadn’t really committed to it (i.e., we hadn’t found time to do anything about it). Until last week. President’s Day, to be exact. The boys were home and pleasantly playing Legos (notice I did not say “quietly”) in the game room with the TV on. Have I mentioned that Bryan had his work-from-home workstation set up in the gameroom? Oh, well, he did. You can see where this is going, right?

I could tell Bryan was hard at work in the dining room, moving things around and occasionally asking Jacob to help move this or that to the garage (including Sadie’s crate – I was shocked!). I had no idea just how hard he was working, until I peeked in and saw this!

Even Sadie likes being in the room now!

Unfortunately, I don’t have a “before” picture, so this picture doesn’t fully do justice to the work Bryan (and Jacob) did. But let’s see if I can explain a little bit what was done.

• See the piano? It used to be where the computer table is now. I don’t know how Bryan moved it without help, and I don’t think I want to know. I’m grateful he’s not in the hospital with a hernia.
• The blue chair in the corner? It used to be in front of the window (just to be stashed out of the way when the new living room furniture arrived) and COVERED in dog hair, because Sadie had decided it was her perch to watch the world outside the windows. (Note: the blue exercise ball is in the chair now to keep Sadie out of it. And it makes a pretty good ottoman.)
• The two end tables (one in the back corner opposite the blue chair, one in the bottom left of the picture) used to be stacked on top of each other, doing nothing but collecting dust and holding junk.
• The card table (that you can’t tell in the picture, but is holding my sewing stuff) used to be in the middle of the room, because that’s where I left it a month ago after making a few blankets.
• Things that you no longer see in the room: Sadie’s crate, our file cabinet, and a whole bunch of other junk that I’m embarrassed to say we had stashed not-so-out-of-sight in there.

Clearly, there’s still some work to do – a real desk instead of Bryan’s sad folding table, possibly a ceiling fan (or at least a different light fixture), the blue chair will eventually make way for one more fitting of the space (but hopefully just as comfy), and maybe a real sewing table for me? (I had to toss that out there, right?) But I think it’s a great start, and I’m just SO glad that the first thing you see in the house is no longer the Junk Room.