The forgetting room, the growing room

I walked into our middle room the other day, the one we've been using as an "office" since we moved in. It would make a better "learning room" than "office," I thought. After all, we put our last desktop computer to bed a few years ago so other than the cable modem and Airport (and an old drive used to store music and movies we access from the TV only) there's no need for a traditional office in our home. That's why our office had really become more of a storage area over the years, storing mostly the "we're-too-lazy-to-file-these" piles of paper as well as our "rarely-used-now-that-we've-gone-paperless" office supplies. It had become the kind of room that you entered only to drop off more forgettable items, or to forage in cases of missing items unfound in any other crannies of the house. The forgetting room.

Really I had forgotten what a great space it was: big window, walk-in closet, lots of wall space for maps and artwork. Rather than a forgotten office it needed to be a light-filled, people filled, art and book filled space. So Saturday morning we started by rescuing the closet from the twin mattress set that had been inhabiting it since we brought home the bunk-beds from my parents' house two years ago when we were ready for only one of them. Calvin isn't old enough to sleep on the top bunk yet, but he is old enough to have it set up, so we started the office reclamation project by growing Calvin's room. Vertically. He's thrilled.

The rest of the weekend went to shredding, recycling, filing, dragging furniture, storing or giving away obsolete stuff, and moving in more relevant materials. It took two full days, but Monday morning Calvin and I sat our light-filled room and looked at the huge map on the wall, drew pictures at our desks and hung them up, and sat on the floor to play games, enjoying the open space. As an additional plus I got to move a good portion of our art and craft items out of our guest room, leaving more space in there for, not guests, but sewing.

Welcome to our new learning office.