The Bedroom Shuffle

 Funny how these sorts of projects start.

Years ago when we were looking to move and searching through available housing inventories, our chief complaint was trying to find a house with three bedrooms together, one of which was the master bedroom. We had a young child and another one on the way at the time and the last thing we needed were bedrooms on the opposite side of the house from each other or even on different floors. This requirement really delayed our house search but eventually we prevailed. 

Flash forward another decade plus in years and we now have older children who wish they were farther away from us and a live-in parent who wishes her bedroom wasn't down a flight of stairs and in the far corner of our basement. So one evening while the live-in parent was still overseas visiting her other child, the subject of doing a bedroom swap came up and the project was immediately born.

The plan:

While mother-in-law is still overseas, I need to remove her stuff and finish remodeling that room. When I originally created the MIL Suite as we refer to it (just a bedroom, bathroom and living area but no kitchenette), I didn't do the flooring at the time. I wanted too but it just wasn't in the budget back then. So I want to redo the flooring of all those areas while I will have unfettered access to the room. I can paint it a different color and my oldest will move her bedroom into that area. Needless to say, she is terribly excited about it and suddenly volunteering to do oodles of work to get it done as quickly as possible. For now, I will just floor the bedroom and leave the other areas for later.

Once she is moved in, I need to repaint her old room. It has older carpet in it but still in good enough shape for now. The youngest one wants to move into it because it is much bigger than her current room. 

Then I need to tear up the carpeting in what will become the new MIL room because the youngest had several terrible industrial style accidents in there from the looks of it. I think they are remnants of her slime making phase. Anyway, once the carpet is replaced and the room repainted, I can move all of her stuff, currently crammed into our family room, up and into place.

Once that is finished, I can refloor the rest of the living area downstairs, redo the closet downstairs which hasn't been touched either, and do some electrical rejiggering to move MIL's private television upstairs to a room that doesn't have a hookup. 

Oh, and I have six weeks to get this all done before MIL returns. It is still too cold to work outside as I write this, so I have the time right now but I still hate timelines in general when it comes to stuff like this. But when all is said and done, every square inch of this house will have been touched by me at some point and perhaps I can now rest for awhile... at least a day, before starting over again.