For the past week, I’ve been working on swapping my front room with my back room.  I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile – over a year – but I kept running into resistance from other family members (..ahem… DH).  But after some more arm twisting, we agreed to swap the rooms.  Before the move, my front room – the room people walked into when they came in the front door – housed my computer, the Wii and Dan’s toys.  It was usually a big mess.  It was not an easy room to walk into every day nor was it a room conducive to having people sit down when they came over.  Typically people would stand around at the front door and stare at my big mess.  lol!   I was just tired of it.

I took before photos – but I took them on my regular camera and for some reason my laptop isn’t reading my SD card this morning.  The drive isn’t even coming up.  The SD card is working because my camera recognizes it and usually my laptop recognizes it fine.  Not going to be good if my SD reader is bad on my laptop.  So I have no before photos to show you… only photos of my work in progress…the photos below were taken on my iPhone as I went along and are quite blurry.  I have an older blog post (opens in new window) that has two photos of what my office and front door could get like although they weren’t this bad when I started my move…it’s always nice to have a point of reference. lol!

DAY 1 – Tuesday – The plan

The first thing I did was put together a planning sheet of where everything was going to go. I’m usually pretty good at visualizing things like this in my head… but I will still plan out diagrams on paper and work things out from there.  I try to make my diagrams as close to scale as I can but they aren’t perfect.

This was my original new front room layout.  It stayed exactly how I planned it out.

This was my original configuration of the backroom.  The black areas are the fireplace and right in front of the back door.  I ended up not having the one bookcase come out perpendicular to the wall in the end and my desk ended up turned the other way around.

After I had the two rooms planned out, I needed a plan as to how I was going to move the furniture and the nightmare that is my office.  A lot of times, I can just visualize things like this in my head – but in this case, I made myself a step by step list.

I pretty much stayed on track with my list although a few things were swapped in order.

DAY 2 – Wednesday

So the process began…. clearing up my desk area so I could move my bookcase over was probably the biggest item on the list.

Moving most of my desk into the dining room as a temporary holding area… this photo was taken before everything was moved into this area.

The bookcase below was actually over to the left and housed everything you see on the desk.  The books in it now came from the bookcases in the backroom.

All of Dan’s toys were removed – they’ll end up in the backroom at some point – I don’t think I’ll be able to avoid that.  lol!

That was the end of the first day.

Day 3 – Thursday

The photo below was actually the third or fourth step on Day 3.  Prior to taking this photo, all the couches and bookshelves and TV cabinet were moved and the rug was steam cleaned.  Then I took my desk apart and moved it in two pieces putting it back together on this end.

On the other side of the backroom, the TV cabinet and couches were moved – with the couches eventually going into the front room.  But at this point, we didn’t have cable in the front so for two nights we watched TV back here like this.  Cozy.  lol!

Then the bookcase on the left was moved from the front room.  Had to take the top shelf off to get it under the doorway casing.  Everything on this bookcase came from the front room.  I had also moved my two file cabinets into place as well as staged my printers.

This was the end of day 3.

DAY 4 – Friday

Friday was spent putting my office back together.  Hooking up my monitors, organizing my shelves, etc.  At this point, I went through papers and notebooks and threw things out.

DAY 5 – Saturday

Moved the couches into the front room.  And, yes, I need to go through the coats on the wall.

The armoire below was delivered (via Rick’s parents) on Saturday morning and it houses a new TV (via my mom).  This TV wouldn’t fit in our other TV cabinet so it’s been sitting in our dining room for the last two months.  We finally got it hooked up with the new armoire.  Love when our parents decide its time to “upgrade” furniture… usually their “old” furniture isn’t really THAT old… in the case below, both parents wanted TV upgrades so we were lucky and got their old items (which work great and look good too!)

In the backroom, we have a large area where the kids can still play – and we can workout (oh yeah… gotta get back to that workout thing…)

Rick is now calling my office, the Watchtower (for those of you Smallville fans).  It’s the first time, I have three monitors setup.  I just didn’t have the space on my desk before.  Very cool.

I’m pretty excited that this is done.  I was able to do the majority of it by myself.  With a little help from these little guys… what a woman can do by herself these days…

So pretty much I spent two days moving furniture around and one day setting up my office.  Not too bad.  Now hopefully things will stay picked up…well, a girl can dream can’t she?

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