Room for Baby

One of the big goals for us this month is getting the second bedroom baby-ready. I have to laugh when people ask me if the nursery's ready, because, well, there is so much I have to do before the baby comes (half of it not directly baby-related), and decorating is my lowest priority at this point. But soon we will get our crib, and then we can at least organize the room for his arrival.

Right now it looks like a disaster zone, and it's one of those "it'll-get-worse-before-it-gets-better" situations. The problem is that it's not just about that one room--organizing and relocating the things in there entails organizing and relocating the entire apartment.

For example, today we moved the bookshelf into the living room. This involved reorganizing the living room furniture, which meant moving chairs and things into other rooms. It also involved reorganizing all the shelves--though I won't complain about the latter, since organizing books is a peaceful sort of problem-solving that I don't mind. I'm not entirely happy about the new living room layout, but I might just need time to get used to it.

Just to give you an idea ... this is what the second bedroom looked like for most of the summer.

And then in November we had company, so it looked like this.

Not so bad, right?

But then there was Christmas, and baby furniture, and various other things ... and now it looks like this.

Yikes.

The stuff in the foreground is mostly craft supplies that were evicted from the bookshelf and need a new home.

It looks worse than it is in terms of the effort needed to clean it up ... at least that's what I'm telling myself. But in the meantime it looks pretty bad, doesn't it? We'll continue to chip away at it as we can.