Rearranging

I began writing this enormous epistle on organizing and the lack thereof at my house, but it has gotten unwieldy and tangential (irony: my blog post about organizing is unorganized). Instead I will boil it down to the most important concept at the moment:  the attic playroom here goes unused.

There are many many other organizational problems at this house, which I hope to address eventually in turn, but my biggest problem for now is that my kids don't want to play in the attic.  They want to play in the living room, where I am. (Also where the tv is.)  This means that eight frajillion toys are also in my living room on a daily basis.  I like my kids in my living room.  I do not like eight frajillion toys in my living room.

In previous houses, this was never really a problem.  In our South Jersey house, we had a small room off the kitchen that housed all our toys.  In our last apartment, all our rooms were on one floor, and we used the third bedroom as a playroom.  In each case, the playroom was on the main floor, closely connected to the living spaces.

Here, the playroom is in the attic, up lots and lots of stairs.  Its a spacious attic, with plenty of room to spread out and build forts and train tracks and battle your favorite 80s Japanese anime character.  But its not where Mommy is.   Peter will go upstairs with a basket or a bookbag, load up, and bring whatever he wants to play with downstairs.  I'm sure in a few years my children will much prefer to be the attic where Mommy is NOT, but at the moment, they are my little shadows.  Truth be told, I like having them around. I just hate impaling my feet with their toys.

I've noticed that in whatever house we live in, it takes a few months, or years even, to figure out what the best use of our space is.  Here, if I were moving in tomorrow, now I know I'd put the master bedroom in the attic, green carpet be damned, and put the playroom in the second floor master.  But we are pretty sure we are not staying that long in this house, and there is a lot of furniture and a lot of narrow bending stairwells involved in switching the two rooms, so that's not going to happen.

I am thinking of taking out the 400 lb campaign dresser under the tv (the Mister will be thrilled!),

and replacing it with an Expedit from the attic. That gets me 8 bins of toys corralled.  Don't tell the children, but I am also planning a HUGE toy purge. Its heresy for a design blogger to get rid of a campaign dresser, but I'm starting a trend. I'll take mass-produced Ikea over vintage pieces with character any day!

Le sigh.  

There are seasons to life, and this season is filled with cheap plastic toys that need to be dealt with. (The Legos, omg, the Legos....do any of you have Lego-obsessed children, and what storage methods have you adopted to deal with the shards of plastic I keep stepping on?)  Now I know that our next house needs a playroom/family room on the first floor and will plan accordingly.