Making Room for Baby

Before, pt. 1

I’ve mentioned before that we live in a small apartment and that trying to find room to fit a baby has been a challenge. We have no spare bedroom for a nursery, so we’re having to move things around and get creative with storage to fit everything in.

The first thing we had to do was clear out the closet in the second bedroom (which we’re using as a home office/electronics center.) When we started, we were using it as a storage closet primarily for electronics, although as you can see, we also have some clothes, board games, musical instruments, and our printer hanging out in there.

The question was: where should all of this stuff go?

The first thing we did was get rid of Kellen’s workbench, which was taking up half the adjacent wall and taking up a lot of space without being particularly functional or attractive. So we got rid of the workbench and replaced it with a metal shelving unit from Fred Meyer. From there, we moved several items (the printer, the electronics and accouterments, the video games) onto the new shelves.

The guitars we mounted on the walls in our dining room.

This left us a lot of open space in the closet, although we realized pretty quickly that Kellen’s old bookcase was not going to be the best thing for storing baby things. So we went hunting for something we could use in that closet for storage instead. We had a lot of different ideas, but ultimately, I wasn’t happy with anything we found. It either wouldn’t fit, was too expensive, or was too poor quality.

Before, pt. 2

In the mean time, we were trying to figure out how we were going to make everything fit in our bedroom as well. We were planning to put the cosleeper in our room, on my side of the bed. The way we have things set up now, though, the cosleeper would block access to the cabinet with the towels and wash cloths.

After!

I put the new hanging jewelry organizer I’d gotten after cleaning out my jewelry box (literally a huge cardboard box filled with bags of jewelry that I’ve been accumulating since childhood that has moved with me probably a dozen times to 4 different states), and turned it so that the empty side could be used for baby storage. I filled the little pockets with baby socks and extra elastics for my FuzziBunz.  On the wall, I hung up the IKEA hanging storage that my MIL bought for us and used it to store cloth diapers.