In total it took about 6 weeks of work but now that it’s over we’re pretty happy with the results. What started out as a goal to get the girls separated into their own rooms ended up with us turning our house completely inside out and rearranging everything. We performed a complete Chinese Fire Drill on our house!
Check out everything we did:
First we had to get every kid their own room. After a lot of deliberation we decided to move Gavin & Lily upstairs into our old Office & Guest Bedroom respectively.
These rooms had really old, long closets with a small doorway that made half the closet unusable. So we hired a contractor to come in and open up the doorway in each closet and give them full access.
Then it was time to paint & we installed the closet organizers ourselves to give the kids the most amount of storage that we could possible squeeze out.
Then we had to get Gavin’s furniture moved upstairs so his room could be readied for Cara. 
Also, Lily was due for a big girl bed and furniture set of her own.
Then it was time for Cara’s room. More painting!!
The hardest thing to figure out with this whole move was what we were going to do with the office & where guests were going to sleep.
We must have gone back and forth on a dozen options but for now this is what we settled on. Lily & Cara’s old room has been converted into the combination Office & Guest room. We’re still looking to get a new desk that might be a little smaller but all in all I think it works pretty well for what we need.
Here is where the story gets really interesting – read CRAZY. We were severely disturbed about getting rid of our sectional couch. Yeah it’s big and hard to fit in a San Francisco sized house but oh it’s so COMFY!! We just couldn’t come to part with it. After some hard internal reflection we decided to damn convention and let’s design our house for the way we need to use it. There’s no point in having 2 rooms that you never enter just because you’re supposed to. So we got rid of the dining room and we made the formal living room into the comfy little lounge that we might actually use.
The old dining room is the last room that we’re still figuring out. But at the moment the plan is to turn it into a “Homework Room” or the less fearsome “Study”. The idea here is to have a couch and eventually 3 little desks where we can sit, read, do homework, whatever it is the kids need to do. We’ve got more work to do to pull this room together but we’re really happy with the idea so we’ll have to wait and see how we feel about it in the long run.
