Room For Two

We spent most of last Sunday putting the finishing touches on our room for two. Yes, Cate and Brennan will be sharing a room until we move out of this house (which won't be until Brennan is potty trained so that we can get rid of the changing table and diaper pail before we start showing our house). We only have two bedrooms, so they don't have much of a choice. While this may not seem ideal to a lot of our friends and acquaintances who live in larger, more suburban homes, it's more common around our part of town than I thought. This is mostly because a lot of the houses in this area are between 75 and 100 years old. If they haven't been totally gutted and remodeled or had an addition put on, then most likely there are only two or three bedrooms. It doesn't bother me and I don't feel any pressure to put our house up for sale immediately. I realize that there will come a time in both of our kids' lives when sharing a room with a sibling of the opposite sex isn't the best option for us. But for now, we have a great house in a great neighborhood and we are totally making a room for two work.

(Sidenote: we actually have a few friends that have the added convenience of a third or in rare cases, fourth, bedroom, but still have their children share rooms-- same gender and opposite gender. They all say the kids love having the company).

Brennan will obviously be in our room until he can sleep pretty solidly through the night so as not to wake Cate. But he'll definitely nap in the crib from day one, just as Cate did. Anyway...the closet was our biggest project. I think the shelving in there was as old as the house itself and taking it down tore away some plaster. So after re-plastering and some painting, we were able to install two new shelving units that also hang clothing. A shoe organizer on the door, some extra drawers at the bottom of the closet, and now the closet functionally serves two kids with plenty of room to spare since we know they'll both get spoiled with some new clothes come Christmas time. Our next task was to find something cute to put above Cate's bed. HomeGoods (I think it's owned by TJ Maxx) had a couple of cute, primary colored canvas paintings on clearance for $5 each. I scooped those up and paired them with some flags I bought from a local crafter at the Over the Rhine Second Sunday festival last month (the flags were also $5). Voila-- Cate's corner of the room was done!
When the crib used to be the center of the room, a cute circus canvas painting hung directly over it. I loved where that painting was on the wall and didn't want to move it. We headed to Pottery Barn Kids to pick up a couple of letters and now that wall looks like this:
The changing table is still in pretty much the same spot. And it still has the quilt hanging above it. The only new change is that the crib is now over on that side of the room as well. Cate needed some bedding to match, which wasn't too hard to find at Burlington Coat Factory. All in all, I think our room for two is pretty cute, don't you?It doesn't feel crowded or cramped at all. Daddy was definitely proud of all of his handiwork in the closet and Cate can't wait for Brennan to get here and sleep in the crib.
This also a point in time where I am very thankful we went with gender-neutral bedding when we were preparing for Cate. It has made preparing for Brennan easier and way more affordable. The thought of having to buy a whole other set of crib bedding makes me anxious and I'm glad we don't have to worry about that.

~Melody :-)

PS...Yes, our crib converts to a toddler bed. So when Brennan starts jailbreaking from the crib, we'll convert it rather than get another twin bed. He'll sleep in the toddler bed until we move, which will hopefully be sometime between age 3 and 4 for him....unless his feet are hanging off the edge. But even our tall sweet girl still fits just fine on that crib mattress.