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A Changed Workspace (again)
Household circumstances have turned my office into a multi-purpose room.
About two weeks ago, our basement flooded. It has been like a monsoon, and our sump pump failed. Water pooled in two unfinished closets before finally seeping up through the floorboards. A water mitigation company determined that the floor was not salvageable and tore the entire thing out.
Both of my older kids sleep in the basement. The 11-year-old has his own room, and the 9-year-old sleeps in the large playroom with room dividers to section off his own space.
I knew instinctively that there would be no “quick fix.” I have heard that any company that does home improvement projects is booked out. Being stuck at home due to Covid… lots of people decided to do home updates. So the immediate question became: what do we do with the kids?
The daybed in my office pulls out into a king-sized bed… juuuuuust barely fitting into the room with my desk. I thought that we could put both of the kids onto this bed together. Then immediately thought better of the idea.
If I let the kids sleep in my office, there would be stuff everywhere. And no room to walk. I’d have to look at an unmade bed overrun with their stuffed animals every day.
I decided that it would be better to let them move into the master bedroom. I would sleep in my office, and my husband would sleep in his office (which also has a daybed). The kids could bring all of their favorite things up from the basement and turn the master into their own dedicated space for what will likely be 4–6 weeks.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve completely repurposed rooms in the past year. In fact, it is the third time.
In the Fall, when my kids were home 100% of the time for remote learning, we turned our living room into a classroom. We quickly realized that when they did schoolwork from their rooms, not a lot got done. Even though I couldn’t look over their shoulders every minute, having them centrally located in the house made it much easier. We used room dividers to section off part of the living room and moved their desks into the space. It stayed that way until they returned to the classroom full-time in April.
