I’ve mentioned before that I was working on converting my office into a bedroom for my son. Well, now it’s done. (Okay, mostly done.) There were many steps to this process, which dragged out because I insisted on continuing to use the room as an office during all of this except the very last. So many steps that I’ve forgotten most of them.

This is the (mostly) finished third bedroom. Image made this morning (click the photo to see it larger). The camera is facing generally south, with the eastern windows at left and the western wall at right — which includes the closet door (just out of frame) and the door exiting the room (at my right). The superwide-angle lens makes the bed appear larger than it is. It is a standard twin.

The last of the house’s rooms to retain the original builder’s color (“Brazil nut”), I began painting the office in November 2018, using the color my son had chosen: “Azure Afternoon” by Glidden. I went around the doors and finished that first wall (the west wall) by early December. The south wall didn’t get finished until January. Then the east wall took a few more days (done in mid-January). I didn’t finish the final (north) wall until Feb. 5, 2019, two months and six days after I began. I used exactly one gallon of paint for this room, and was worried up until the last brush stroke that I would run out.

During all the painting, as I kept moving things around to free up the next wall, I got rid of things — to GoodWill, recycling, trash, secondhand stores, etc. We threw out an entire bookshelf, one I’d had since 1996.

Before it could actually become Benjamin’s room, I had to get my desk (and PC) out of there, which meant I had to have somewhere else to put the desk (and PC). So I moved the “reading nook” in our master bedroom around a little to free up a corner. Needing more space for other things, my wife and I rearranged our master bedroom’s closet and I moved our bed frame to create even more space.

And even once there was a place to put the desk, I had to make sure the PC could connect wirelessly to the internet (because there’s no cable jack in our bedroom and I didn’t want to either (1) pay someone to run new cable and install a jack, or (2) have a 50-foot ethernet cable snaking through the house). So I bought a wireless internet adapter for the PC. When I unplugged the PC from the router to test the new adapter, the PC connected wirelessly to the router before I even plugged in the new device. This startled me; I’d had the computer wired to the router so long I didn’t know it could connect wirelessly. A little embarrassed, I tested the adapter and it worked too. So then I could move the router out of the office into the living room, and move the desk/PC into our bedroom.

Click the image to see it larger. This is meant to show the relative size difference between the old, shared dresser, and the new “Malm” dressers from Ikea. The old one was found at a yard sale by my mother in 2001 for $15 or so, and I used it for myself until getting married in 2006 (my wife came complete with a much nicer dresser set). Then it was used as a spare until we had children, who have used it since 2010. The new dressers, only one of which is shown here, are identical. Each is larger than the half-dresser each child got before, but smaller than the whole old dresser.

Just this week, I went through the final steps: (1) getting (most of) the rest of my junk out of the office and finding other places for it, (2) taking the kids’ bunk beds apart — which I managed to do alone, while the wife and kids were at work and school, (3) disassembling the boy’s bed (so it could fit through the doorway), and (4) reassembling it in his new room. Ah, I almost forgot. A few days earlier, I had bought and assembled two identical “Malm” (Ikea) dressers for the children, one for each room. The dressers are each smaller than the big one RnB had been sharing, but now each child has more storage space for clothes than they did before.

Benjamin’s first night in his new room was Thursday, Feb. 28. That night, the mattress was on the floor. The next night, March 1, he had the whole frame in there. We moved his clothes and toys into his new closet/dresser, and this morning we put up some of his posters. Big sister is happy too; she’s been longing for her own room for several years.

So: both children have more room for all their things, and more privacy/distance from each other. And my “office” is now in a nicer/quieter room, though I have less space for my things. And as I thought that, I realized that this is part of the circle of life — parents getting out of the way and giving their children more room to grow and flourish.

So what’s next in household renovation, you might ask? I think we’re done for now. Or at least I am. Most of the above work I did myself, in between other daily chores, and a lot of it was done while I was sick (my first recorded illness in three years), while the wife and kids were sick with an assortment of strep, pinkeye, flu-like something-or-other, and possibly more. So I’m ready for several days of “normal”, and then Spring Break is just around the corner. If our weather ever breaks out of this weird warm/cold thing we’ve been doing, I will soon focus my free-time efforts on the lawn; when the weather isn’t cooperating, I’ve got a new short fiction story in the works.

Click the image to see it larger. This is my new “office” — the southwestern corner of the master bedroom, where the “reading nook” used to be (see it here). There was enough room to fit the desk (60 inches wide) and the plastic set of drawers between the dresser and the western wall. The reading chair (visible at right) has been moved to the middle of the western wall. My wireless internet connection in here isn’t as fast as in the rest of the house, but it’s still faster than we had anywhere just a couple of years ago. (And for some reason, only the download speed is compromised; the upload speed is still normal.)