A room for T

This adoption is NOT going to have any major home remodeling/addition project associated with it, but there will be a few smaller scale modifications we do plan to do to make the accommodations for our new daughters a little bit nicer.

T's room is the easy one. Because she is developmentally like a newborn, she has no need for a separate bedroom in which to play and keep her things - she just needs a place big enough for her to sleep, and because of her seizures we want to keep her closer to us at night anyway. Reuben's "bedroom" is currently a space under the eaves that used to be a cold-storage closet, but we finished into a small play space when Owen was born. It runs the width of our bedroom, and though the ceiling is 4'6" at the highest, for a child that's enough, especially since most of what he does there is sleep.

 This is a photo of our bedroom, and you can see the opening into the closet at the far end of the room. (Convenient that we have nice photos of every room of the house taken recently as part of our commitment documents!)

T's little room is going to be on the *other* side of the bed. On this end, the closets were finished as regular storage spaces - some half-height hanging and one with shelves in it. They aren't as deep as the one on Reuben's side because the knee wall was framed much further in, but since all T needs is simply just a place to sleep, it will be just perfect.

Once it's done.

We started by pulling out everything we'd stored in there, as well as the two large shelves. It looks pretty nasty! We're not even sure if the plaster in there has ever been painted, or if it's still just the raw plaster.

 Just adding a coat of primer made a huge difference!

And, of course, this closet used to be full of stuff (out of size/season clothing for children, to be specific), and that stuff doesn't just disappear into thin air because we need the space, that means that we started going through two similar closets at the other end of the upstairs hallway as well to clear out enough stuff to make space for the things we're displacing for T!

These two hall closets are connected, and once the shelves (and the stuff) were taken out of the one, there was plenty of room to play!!

 It's been quite a job, and the upstairs currently looks like something exploded up there, but it's been a good excuse to go through old things (no, we really don't need *all* of our notes from classes we took in graduate school!) and to be wiser about how we store other things, besides being a lot of plain old fun to be working toward getting ready for a new member of our family!