As you may have heard, we’re having a baby.

After living essentially 2 decades under the impression that I was never gonna have kids, this has been quite the change. This kid will need a place to sleep, guests will need a place to sleep, and somehow we gotta fit all our junk in the house as well.

This Operation has 3 major stages:

– Clean and Reorganize the Basement
– Convert Guest Room into Nursery
– Convert Office into Office/Guest Room

Three simple steps, right? Not exactly. Some tasks had to be done in order. For example, I had to clear out the Office closet, but I couldn’t do that until I got the Basement taken care of. And we couldn’t clean out the Guest Room closet until the Office closet got cleaned out so we had somewhere to put all the stuff. And we couldn’t do anything with the original Guest Room until the bed was out of it.

We worked on this most of the holiday weekend and we are 99% done. The only thing remaining is to get the baby dresser and toy box from the basement into the nursery.

A few highlights:

– We took 4 carloads of junk to the dumpster. (Thankfully K-Bomb had access to said dumpster. Keeping that junk in my garage until Scrub Day would have sucked.)
– One at a time, I put items on Craigslist in the Free section and told people to just come get them out of my driveway. Most were gone in under an hour. This saved me a massive amount of effort if I was to get rid of them myself. The items: an old elliptical, a giant entertainment center, a huge bookshelf, and some dishes.
– We boxed up all my nerd books, our DVDs, our books, and my old video games. We got about $600 for all of that. It will buy the new futon we’ll put in the office and get us a good start on a baby seat.
– We got all our tote storage into the walk-in closet in the basement with room to spare. Quite happy about that. I’m even happier it’s all in one organized spot.
– Leslie from Rockwell City, a friend I hadn’t seen in several years, took the queen-sized bed from the guest room off our hands. She solved a problem for me and it was nice to chat and catch up a bit. (Hi Leslie!)
– We gave away a game table, a TV, a TV stand, and some bedding/pillows.

Looking forward:

– My In-laws were very generous and ordered us a convertible crib. It’s back-ordered at the moment, but will be here well before the kid gets here.
– We will go shopping in the near future to find a futon for the Office.
– One benefit of having a kid later than everyone else is that they are done with their baby stuff and are offering it to us. We’ll get together with some of these fine folks and take them up on it.
– We have to get registered for the baby shower.

And there is even more to do, some I know of, more that I’m sure I don’t. Stay tuned!