Living Room Remodel - Part 1

A blog post? On Monday? Is everything okay at the Webber house? (Well, I have a fungal infection on my skin that turned me in to Polka-Dotted Sarah, but there will be no pictures of that!) Marshall is turning our living room into a place we all like to inhabit (instead of a place where the children play and Marshall and I avoid because it looks so well-worn) and I'm going to try to document the process on my blog. So here we go!

On Thursday night, Marshall and I moved 2 bookshelves and their contents to the front room. One bookcase had been residing in the corner of our bedroom while the other was in the corner of the living room. Now they are all 3 stacked together.

Back before we had children, the room that is now Miranda's was our library, full of books and a couch for reading. Of course, the couch belonged to the dog and always smelled like him, but still, it was very pleasant.

Part of the reason for the remodel of our living room is to build in bookshelves so that we can put the contents of 6 different free-standing bookshelves into our built-in shelves. This is one of those corners that will be transformed into a book shelf:

The blue chair has been moved out to the street; there will be no room for an easy chair in that corner once the bookshelves have been built.

This is where the kids' computer table resided. Obviously, it's been over-decorated. This will be repaired and I'm going to be putting a trash can here as well because when we moved the couches, this is what we found:

Yes, that is a pair of Alex's underwear among the toy cars, papers, chew toys, cheerios, crackers and 3 tons of cheese stix wrappers. Apparently, every time Alex got himself a cheese stick, he would tuck the wrapper behind the couch. It was really gross. I picked up all the large stuff with gloves before I vacuumed the crumbs.

Alex gets to have the kids' computer and the family printer in his room on the little table, but we unplug it at bedtime so he doesn't sneak in more Dr. Seuss on You Tube after hours.

Emptying bookcases and moving them from here to there:

and here

to there

That would be the television behind the green sheet.
And now it's a blank wall.

The couches are up on their ends to take up as little space as possible, which, of course, makes a good place for reading for small persons:

Yes, I know, Alex has a silly picture smile.

And, of course, you need to steam clean the carpet before you start a new project because the sooner you can get out the stains of lime yogurt and white grape juice, the better.

A good start, all in all, for our first weekend on the project.