I Haven't Been Gone, Just Trapped Under Something Heavy.

I've been trying to catch up on my blog reading this morning. Wow! I'm WAY behind..sorry.

Last week was preparation for Spring Winter Cleaning in the Land of Pink. Have you ever noticed how much PREP it takes to clean out one room?

Our goal was to purge and organize the "little girls'" room. Coral-10, Rose-4, and Scarlet-3 share a room. The youngest two are not much help in keeping the room clean, and Coral often gets overwhelmed at the daunting nature of the task. But Mama had a solution:

Turn our loft into a play room for the little ones, storing all their toys there, and thus giving Coral more ownership in the bedroom-proper.

I liked it. They liked it. EVEN REDDADDY LIKED IT... so much so that he offered to spend his Friday off doing whatever I needed him to do to get it done!

Do I have a fantastic husband or what?!

Okay, so back to the prep work.

If we were to make the loft a play room, we first needed to transfer our schoolroom stuff somewhere else. The office won the toss...so the first thing on the list became cleaning out some space in the office for school books and supplies.

Of course that meant finding a place for all THAT stuff...see how this goes?!

Anyway, we made it through, and about 8 hours later we had gone from this:

To this:

Yeah, man!
Check out this great play space...

Next up is painting the walls and putting in the new linens. I need to make a twin and a toddler-sized comforter from the full one we bought, and do some kind of window treatment. We are also planning to purchase a LOCKING cabinet for the toy storage (ingenious, I know!) and two matching chest-of-drawers to house all their clothes. I can't wait for the finished product!

All that to say, I'm finding that balance between the housework and blogging I was writing about, even though it often feels like this: