Our Place-- the living room

When we moved into our current place here in Columbia, we lost quite a bit of room and a TON of storage space.  I didn't love our last place, and it was way too expensive, but it did have tons of storage, which was awesome.  It had a big coat & storage closet under the stairs, a large pantry, a large storage closet beside the pantry, cabinet space under the sink in the downstairs bathroom, double cabinet space under the sinks in the upstairs bathroom, a linen closet, a closet along an entire wall in our bedroom, and a decent-sized closet in Naomi's bedroom.  For a little townhouse, it had awesome storage.

Here, however, there is practically nothing.  We have a decent-sized closet in our room, and the girls' closets have a little space for some storage, and there is a small closet under the stairs, but that's it.  No pantry.  No linen closet.  No cabinets for storage in the bathrooms (the sinks are those pedestal sinks, so there aren't any cabinets under them).  No extra storage closets.  So I have had a really hard time unpacking our stuff.  We've been here for 7 months now, and until this week, our living room still had quite a few unpacked boxes & bins lining the walls & stacked in corners.  So you can get an idea of how bad the room looked before and how much stuff we had to move, here are two pictures (both were taken by Naomi... she likes to play with the camera):

You can see some of the storage I stacked under the computer table and some of the junk that was sitting on the treadmill. 

Another view of the stuff stacked on the treadmill.  There was probably the same amount of junk & bins & boxes stacked in the corner of the room, too, but I don't have a picture of that.

I finally decided I couldn't stand it anymore (and I needed our house to look nice because I am going to start doing a little babysitting here--more on that later), so I went on a cleaning frenzy.  I basically organized and tidied and deep cleaned for 3 days straight.  (I am exhausted!)  And when Jacob was off on Wednesday for the 4th, I made him help me move all the heavy stuff out of the room & rearrange a few pieces of furniture into a better arrangement.  I also made him put up the curtains that I bought way back in February.  I was so excited--this is the first time we've ever had curtains in our living room, and I love it!  I think curtains make any room look 10 times better.  Someday, we will have curtains in our bedroom, too.  Not any day soon, but someday!  :)

Before I decided I wanted to rearrange furniture, I made Jacob finally help me hang some pictures.  But then we moved the furniture around, and the pictures aren't in the right spots anymore.  So please ignore the off-center wall arrangements... I'll have to move them around a bit to get them where I want them.

Because of the lack of storage space here, I have had to get creative and utilize space that I wouldn't normally use... like under the computer table.  I used the space under the computer table to stack boxes of food storage and some file boxes.  Then, because I hated how trashy it looked with all the stacked boxes/bins underneath, I made a table skirt for it.  I used one of the same red sheets that I used to cover our couch & chair because I had a couple extras, so it even matches.  I used industrial strength Velcro to attach it to the edge of the table, and I cut a separate piece for the space in front of the computer screen so when we are sitting at the computer, we can just take that piece off.  That way, we can scoot the chair in without having the sheet in the way or in our lap.  The one thing I haven't done yet is hem the bottom & edges.  It doesn't look amazing, but it is definitely better than seeing all the boxes!

I also took a ton of toys & moved them to Naomi's room.  We used to not have very many toys, but through gifts from family & friends, we now have a good selection of toys!  We were keeping them all in the living room because Naomi spends most of her time playing there, but that meant the living room looked like a disaster area all the time.  It was impossible to keep the room clean.  Naomi would dump everything and get out every toy so that the floor was covered, and it would take me an hour to clean it up every night.  So I chose enough toys to cover the bottom two shelves of the bookcase and put everything else in a bin in Naomi's room.  She can still play with the rest of the toys in her room, and I can change up the toys that are downstairs every week or so, but I don't have a huge mess to clean up downstairs anymore!  I am loving it!