Scavenging

I mention this a lot, I think, but it's worth noting again how much stuff we have in our house.  You know how when you move, you end up with piles and piles of things to throw or give away?  Lamps, books, kitchen tools,  furniture . . . yeah, nobody ever moves here.  We've actually cleared out quite a bit of extraneous stuff in the last several years, but still.  There's a lot more.

This is why when it came time to convert the former nursery where my brother-in-law slept when we moved in (that then was converted into a study for me when he moved out) into what is now Cubby's room, there was a lot of furniture to be shifted.  In that room were four full bookcases, a desk full of papers, a table, and all the bits and pieces of things that no one could find a place for and so got shoved in there because I kind of stopped using it as a study when I got a laptop and could sit by the woodstove in the winter with my computer rather than shivering upstairs on a desktop.

The bookcases were going in the far back bedroom.  There was a bed in there that needed to be removed and put in the barn.  But to get to that back bedroom we had to clear out the back hallway, which was blocked by a bed waiting to be put in A.'s childhood bedroom back there.  But first we had to get the bed that was already in that bedroom downstairs, into the truck, and over to A.'s aunt's house, where she could use it.

It was like a game of Jenga.  Move this piece first or the whole thing will come tumbling down.

Also, Cubby needed a dresser, thanks to our complete lack of closets.  So I stole the one that's been sitting in the upstairs hall for about twenty years.  It, too, was full of an accumulation of clothing, old papers, photographs, and all the other miscellany that collect in random storage drawers.  The MiL had to do a lot of that sorting.

In sum, to get Cubby into his new room with a bed, a dresser, a chair, and a bookcase, we had to move four full bookcases, four beds (plus the crib that had been stored in the study), a dresser, a table, and a desk.  This is not something I would recommend undertaking when eight months pregnant, by the way.

But!  It all got done.  And the benefit of having this ridiculous excess of household items is that we didn't have to buy anything for Cubby's room.  We had the bed; I found a dresser; there was a chair already in there; I selected two rugs from our stash of about a dozen extra ones that are hanging out in the crawlspace; A. found some posters of fish and animal tracks; and there it was.  A fully furnished little boy's room.

Wait.  I did buy one thing.   A really good window blind to block the light so Cubby would sleep. Which he did, for his nap yesterday and last night with no issues whatsoever.

Success.