The Wall Came Down

You know last week, when the kids were away at cub camp, and I had the week more or less to myself...the week I was going to read and swim and make gourmet meals in between edits...yeah, that week.

Something happened to it. It was hijacked by a random thought that I had on the Thursday before the kids went to camp.

Do you think, I asked my husband, if we knocked down that wall, we could turn out bedroom into two rooms for the girls while they're away?

The short answer was yes.

The long answer involved a pile of things to do. I had to sort the room they were in, tossing and packing and organizing, taking down beds and storing desks and toy boxes and shelves in their brother's room. Then I had to clean their room. There was no way I was living with a pepto-bismol pink room, so since we were moving into their room, I had to prime and paint, and then move all our furniture across the hall.

Next the wall had to come down. Enter Andrew and a crow bar. Our farmhouse was originally a stage coach inn, so his closet was once an old inn room. By taking down the closet wall, we expanded the room by 8 feet, thus allowing us to create two rooms with windows and one room without which will serve as a den/spare room. What he realised and I did not was that the wall was original, which meant lathe and plaster, which meant mess. I realised it as I cleaned up century old dust.

Then we framed. And drywalled. And mudded. And primed. And painted.

And by the time the kids were home from camp on Saturday, our three bedroomed farmhouse was a five bedroomed one and the girls had their own rooms. Small. Unfinished (they still need trim and doors; we still have half their stuff in our room; and the new den is appropriately named-it looks like something animals would live in because I haven't quite finished cleaning it out of all the debris).

But their own.