A busy day

[were_gopher]

I've been looking at Jodies room lately, mostly at the lack of space caused by the mixture of hand me down furniture and poor layout, and finally decided this week to do something about it. We spent a rainy day midweek measuring out the room and the furniture then sat down with a pad of squared paper and a ruler and made a plan of the room with cutouts for the furniture.

One of the major problems of this room is it is actually five sided having been made of a chunk of the attic (which the previous owner divided into a medium size bedroom, a small bedroom, a toilet with a large sink and a small landing) and so has a sloping roof and the door at an angle in order to fit in. What would really increase her space is a high sleeper with a workspace and storage underneath but the roof is too low so what we did instead was move the bed round to the end wall where it doesn't stick out into the room anymore and then bought a new desk with some drawers to replace the oldfashioned school desk and the set of drawers and found a slimmer bookcase so we could put that against the wall instead of having it sticking out at the end of the bed. The desk comes with a small bookcase at one end so she's still got about the same shelf space. The only down side is why do they make desks where the sides only come up less than half the height of the front inside the drawers. I'm going to have to scrounge round for some tubs to put her art supplies in. One of the drawbacks of buying from somewhere like Argos is not finding this out until you've opened the box.


                  OLD                                            NEW


I think she has at least half as much room again and the lighter wood of the new stuff make it feel much more open as well. The desk is now under the light instead of off to the side and the big round bucket of cuddly toys is now a toy mountain kept in check by the foot of the bed and a couple of strategic choices in ones to stuff on the end.

Comments

[were-gopher.livejournal.com]

I looked at cabin beds but they were just too high to go under the lowest point of the slope (which is where the cuddly mountain is now) and would block the radiator if I'd just replaced the standard bed with a cabin one. The desk is ok in front of it because the heat can come out from under and I can still reach the thermostat. Only possible problem is if the box of wax crayons gets to the back of the drawer, instant giant rainbow crayon potential there.

My grandparents had a cottage where you had to walk through two bedrooms to get to the third. It was so old a house that they found wattle inside the brickwork when they punched a hole through for a pipe. The builders reckoned the place had been given a brick facing about 500 years ago when the row of cottages next door were built for the customs officers. Since the cottage was called Church Cottage and was next to the (possibly) Saxon church then this is entirely possible. The only way they could block off the rooms for privacy was curtains because the whole place was listed.