You may have noticed the conspicuous omission of The Child’s room here. I guess there may have been (not so) veiled references to the Bermuda Triangle that was my daughter’s domicile, but I’m pretty sure I never horrified you with a visual of the carnage.
There was very good reason for the omission… you will thank me later.
Her room in San Francisco started off with two major strikes against it: it was impossibly small; and the only window did not look outside, but upon the kitchen (yeah, don’t ask – I have no idea why either). I tried to be very creative in my space planning. I got her a loft bed and put a desk underneath. Her dresser was tucked in an awkward nook. I made every possible attempt to preserve as much floor space as possible.
My efforts were in vain.
The third, and quite possibly largest, strike against her room in SF was that I really tried to let it be “her space”. I didn’t want to nag about keeping it clean – hoping that she would also want to have as much space as possible by making efforts at tidiness. No dice. On at least 4 different occasions I took everything out of her room (overfilling the livingroom), and put it all back neat and orderly-like with “fool proof” organization systems.
The day The Child started packing to move, THIS is what her hovel room looked like. Yeah, I warned you… Honestly, it’s so dark in there because the drifts of detritus eclipsed all light sources. Honest.
So once all of our stuff landed in Sebastopol, one of my first priorities was to create a new and beautiful room that was exceedingly realistic for a 10 year old to keep clean. I wanted lots of open space, a lot less crap, and the threat of great bodily harm whatever is out of place going in the garbage can if she goes to bed even once with a messy room.
This is the result…
She LOVES it. It needs curtains and an area rug, but it’s darn close. In fact, she’s been living in it for 2 weeks straight and I didn’t move a thing to take these pictures. This is exactly how she left it.
