doglet's room

Nothing too much about baby on the way is worrying me right now except for setting up the nursery, so my main focus last week in baby prep was starting to clear out the second bedroom, ie my messy office, to get that started. The shape of the room is narrow and has tricky bumpouts so once we have a nice space to welcome Doglet I'll feel like it's only smooth sailing from there. My plan is draw the room to scale on some grid paper and use trace paper over it to come up with different room layouts. Four years of architecture school has fully prepared me to put this nursery together.

After actually thinking about the room and having a baby in it for a solid 5 minutes I realized that there was no way we were going to be able to keep the big desk in there with monitors and continue using it as a functional office, I don't know what we were thinking. I mentally downsized the plush glider I was thinking I could nurse on to a rickety, cushionless wooden rocking chair. J/K but we're going to have to find something in between that can fit in the corner. The only other place in the house for the desk is going to be the living room in between the front door and the window, where we currently have an open buffet thing where we store shoes. We got the buffet for free but it fits perfectly in that space and is a pretty nice piece, so I am loathe to get rid of it. There's really no where else to put it though. Woe is having a small house. 

I assume I will be back at work after maternity leave ends but I will still work from home when possible, or may need to work odd hours sometimes from home. Zach uses the desk in the second bedroom a lot too, so he can see Twitter and Signal threads on the big screen. So we gotta do what we gotta do to continue to meet our screen needs. 

So this week I posted a bunch of stuff in the second bedroom on Craigslist, including a white 'shabby chic' dresser I bought off Craigslist when we moved in 7 years ago. I bought it a bit on a whim when my parents were in town with their van and I wanted to get a dresser in there so I went for it. 

It wasn't too hard to get rid of. I put it up for $50, mainly because I wanted to sell it fast and the drawers are kind of loose and hang down when you open them. It's a fun looking little dresser but definitely very rustic. I received probably 20 inquiries for the dresser, including another woman who wanted to put it in her upcoming nursery (she was the 2nd person to respond but I laid the facts down hard for her and told her I didn't recommend it for heavy use and she didn't reply back). I ended up selling it to someone who wanted it so bad that she venmo'ed me the night before she picked it up and told me she wasn't bringing anyone with her to pick it up but that she was "strong enough" to carry it by herself. Damn girl. Why does this dresser have so much allure? Zach and I brought it downstairs but I ultimately helped her bring it to her car. I thought I was losing money between the price I originally paid and the sale price because I remember when we were loading it into the van my dad commented that the dresser wasn't worth the money I paid and that I was going to have to eventually pay someone to take it off my hands (lol). But Zach told me I originally bought this dresser for $40 so I apparently made a $10 profit. I didn't realize this dresser was an appreciating asset, I probably could have sold it for more. As a side note, people will go really far out of their way on Craigslist to pick stuff up. I put up one of those himalayan salt lamps for free because it lighted unevenly (which I noted in the ad) so I figured I couldn't sell it for more than $5, and I received probably 50 inquiries. I ended up doing a contactless porch dropoff with a girl who used a lot of emojis in her emails and had a 35 minute one way trip to pick up, which didn't seem worth it to me at all but whatever, glad she got her lamp. 

After I got rid of the dresser I was happy to have that space finally opened up and open to new possibilities. But to my dismay this is what it looks like now:

This is Zach's computer chair that he has been using since JMU. We even recently replaced the chair at the desk with a newer chair from Harry's parent's office (thank you!) that I find really comfortable for sitting in all day. The old chair has been sitting behind the new chair for weeks, in my way every time I turn around in the chair and try to get up. I put Zach's old chair up on Craigslist for free, never thinking that there would be an issue given we were getting rid of a bunch of things in here to clear out space. I clinched a deal immediately and let Zach know someone would be coming the next day to get it. But then I learned that there would be no one coming the next day, because we would be keeping the chair until it was absolutely necessary to get rid of it. So there it sits in the corner, unwanted (by me) and unused (by both of us). But I didn't fight it because it seemed like Zach had a sentimental tie to his old friend, the nasty chair, so I will save the battle for another day. Or if I am totally forbidden from getting rid of the chair, retrofit it by constructing a box on the seat and turning it into a rolling crib.