[twitter]We have our new nanny. Our 4th in 18 months. We are so excited about this new opportunity, more on that later.
We decided that one of the issues before with our nannies was having their bedroom on the main floor. Our home was designed with an office as soon as you enter the front door. When we hired our first nanny, we turned the office into a bedroom and moved our office to the basement where we had a big open space.
The office is right next to our living room, and shares a wall next to our tv. When we get up early on weekend mornings, we gather in our kitchen/living room to make breakfast while the boys watch tv. This was always next to the nanny’s bed. If I wanted to watch a hockey game while Jen watched something on another tv from our PVR, I was sharing a wall with the nanny. The room is right below Charlie’s bedroom, and if they talked to family on skype or the phone after they were off work, it was often tough to put Charlie down. It just felt like we were infringing on their spare time, they were in ours.
Our home has more than enough square feet for 3 adults and 2 kids to live in without stepping on each other’s toes but the layout is just boggling. You should all come over some time.
So we are renovating. We decided to close off the open space in the basement. Of course once you add a wall to a room you had ‘designed’ before the wall existed, things get shifted. Now our couch is 6 inches closer to the tv. To alleviate for that, we’ll be getting rid of the hutch our tv is on and installing it to the wall. That will mean we need to install shelving for the home theatre accessories that go with the tv.
Now that a new wall has gone up, it’s just primer and dry wall. It kind of fits in with the rest of our unpainted basement, but now that we are taking the step of installing curtains and area carpeting in the nanny suite, we are talking painting. The painting then leads to discussions about flooring. The carpet is approaching 10 years old and has little to no life left in it. We only have it down because it isn’t disgustingly stained.
It was one simple idea, spend $1500 to get a wall put up so our nanny could have a larger space to call her own and we could have more room to be a family.
If you’ve ever been through renovations, I’m sure you’re nodding your head.