Accidental Fung Shui

Let me tell you how much I love my husband. He said something to me today that every wife longs to hear. As Sunday afternoon rolled around and I posed the question, what would you like to do with the remaining hours of our weekend? He actually came back with, "I think I'd like to continue with the cleaning." Yep, ladies. Sorry to say but the ring on his finger proves this one is taken and he is all mine! We'd already had a fairly productive weekend. Went hiking with friends, got in a good Saturday afternoon nap, did some grocery shopping, meal planning, laundry and light chores. As I headed out for my second walk with the dogs of the weekend, I even hinted lightly (in other words spelled out to him in plain English) how happy it would make me if he vacuumed the living room while I was gone which he obliged as well. So when he mentioned that he wanted to spend the rest of our Sunday afternoon cleaning the house it wasn't the first thing on my mind but I was quick to get behind him on the effort. He even went so far as to say that he would like to make an effort to be more organized and proactive about chores such as making sure we put our dirty clothes in the hamper and finding a place to put our shoes when we take them off. Actually it's nice, the cleaning part I love of course, but in general, since being laid off, you know we go through stages. And Don seems to be moving into productive stage. He's starting to have ideas brewing, creative juices flowing, and their finally starting to give birth to execution. It's exciting to be around.

So one of the major things on our to do list for creating a more clean and organized home life, was to get the office in shape. It continues to be our "dump" room. There is too much clutter in there to begin with and whenever we don't have a place for something we just throw it into the pile. We really need to go through everything in there, organize the space, store, shred, and donate items, and consolidate the necessities to eliminate the clutter. Recently I blogged about our trip to Matt and Camille's new place and how much we loved their office. We loved the fact that they had included a couch in their office. It gave it so much more of a comfortable, soft, relaxing, livable space, rather than a sterile cold cluttered office environment. Don and I have been thinking about that ever since and decided to jump on Craigslist this afternoon to see what we could find. We liked the idea of getting a sleeper sofa like Matt and Camille so that we would not only be able to relax on the couch in the office and watch Hulu on the Mac but we could also use it as a place for guests to sleep when we have family and friends in town. It was our lucky day as a nice couple had a listing just one block down from where we live now. We headed over and picked it up right away. Perfect! It was in good shape, clean, sturdy, just what the doctor ordered. We payed the bargain used price of $125, loaded it up in the truck, and headed the quarter mile trek back to our place.

Did I say perfect? More like too good to be true. Of course we had taken measurements of the office space to make sure the couch would fit in the office. But we hadn't measured the door frames. The doors in our hallway leading to the office, not to mention the tiny hallway itself, are (to borrow a phrase from my sister) something like straight out of the pages of Alice and Wonderland. Too dang small. No manner of tilting, angling, pushing, or prodding would make the couch fit through the hall into the office. It was mathematically impossible. Darn! So we just dropped some cash on a new couch, which would have been perfect for the setup we were trying to create, but no possible way to get it into the office. Our gears started turning, maybe our friends would want to trade our new larger couch for one of their smaller ones? We called Matt and Camille and made a proposal to them for a trade which they were willing to consider but like they mentioned, their couch had been a gift from family and was all torn up by the cats anyway, so initial thoughts were that it might not really be the best idea. So we pretty much gave up on that and decided to put the couch back up on Craigslist ourselves and hopefully we could at least make our money back. So we made some dinner and went about our evening. Nathan and Paige came over and we played a little game of Vegas Showdown which I won but man was it a close game. We all ended within two points of each other.

After the game, we were sitting around conversing, and about to call it an evening when we got back on the subject of the couch again. It occurred to me, that we do have a large enough living room to accommodate two couches. What if we were to move the chairs into the office and bring the new couch into the living room? It's not exactly how we had pictured it but it just might work. Don mentioned he would miss his recliner, but we would be watching more TV on the computer in the office now than we would in the living room anyway so he might actually prefer it in there. You know this just might work! So we finagled Nathan into helping us bring in the sofa and rearrange the furniture and actually ended up with a really nice living arrangement that actually accommodates more seating now for entertaining and accomplishes what we wanted in the office. There is still a lot of the "cleaning" part now to be done in the office, but now that we have a vision for how things are going to end up it's kind of exciting! I snapped a few photos but I think I'll wait until we have completed the whole project so that you can see the end result all clean and sparkly.

By the way, now that we have more overnight accommodations, anyone want to come for a visit?!