Really, you want to know the secret? Send the kids to grandma and grandpa’s. My MIL is coming to visit for Thanksgiving a week from today and we had to get the playroom turned into a guest room. I know if you have been reading my blog for any length of time you will know that our guest room is now in it’s third location. We have a really small house but are fortunate enough to have 3 rooms upstairs–the playroom use to be Noah’s room. Noah’s current room was the junkroom office and Zoë’s current room was first the guest room and then Noah’s second room. and Noah’s current room was also once the guest room. I know it’s a bit confusing, but now all 3 rooms upstairs have served as both the guest room and Noah’s room. Zoë has been lucky and she has had only one room.
So, today we hung a door and moved the guest bed/futon and rearranged some furniture and toys. I love to rearrange furniture because it makes everything seem new when it isn’t. My brother teases me quite often that he has never met anyone who rearranges more than I do. I enjoy it and I have always moved furniture around as often as possible for the “new” room feel. It’s cheaper than buying stuff to really make the room new.
How to do freshen/change up your space without spending money on those things that would really make it new?
Just had to post this picture of Noah in the bounce house….
Embracing Imperfection 
I’m also a chronic room re-arranger! I purposefully don’t buy “sets” of furniture because most everything ends up in a different room at some point (except Am’s room, she got a set, mainly because we didn’t have time to “collect” the pieces like we would have liked). I actually have a notebook of graph paper with every room of my house mapped out, as well as cut outs of all the furniture–yes, I’m that dorky. My dad was an artist and always told my sis and I we could rearrange our rooms as much as we wanted, but we had to graph it out first so we didn’t have to actually move things 10,000 times. It really does save lots of time and you can quickly see if the chair from the living room will actually work in the corner of the guest room without actually moving it.
I also paint things a lot–certain pieces of furniture and decor have been painted a zillion times. I’m gearing up for some more painting this winter. It’s a good weekend project. I use mixes of leftover or oops paint from home depot, stains, etc. and custom blend. I did all my kitchen cabinets that way and only spent $1.50!
I also swap out photos in frames to coincide with the seasons–if you looked in most of the frames in my house, you’d see about 5 pics behind each one. I have themes for each season (landscapes, pics of the kids), plus all black and whites for when I’m in that mood. I also change out pillows a lot, and sheets. If you do plain bedding (duvet, etc.) it’s easier to do that.
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