Dreaming Up New Ideas

gr8effect via Pixabay

One night last week, a freak accident on our street had us awake at 4AM. Aside from damage to cars, the only casualty was a good night's sleep.

Though I was determined to go back to sleep, sleep eluded me. So, as I often do when my usual endeavors to fall asleep fail, I started rearranging things in my head.

The second bedroom in our house has never actually been a second bedroom. It's been a catch-all for homeless furniture and belongings, an office, a place to stash everything we didn't want falling into the hands of a curious toddler and a playroom. As you can imagine, many of these roles overlapped; there was rarely a time when the room stopped being one thing and became something else entirely.

We are, once again, in one of those transition stages. My daughter, who just turned twenty, has outgrown the playroom, yet many of the trappings of that space (not to mention the collections that lived there) are still in the same places they were in when she was a toddler.

Two months ago, we committed to taking the next step to making the room into a family space that reflected our current family configuration and bought grown-up furniture. We knew it was a little large for the room, and that existing pieces would have to go, but the jury was still out on what was going and where it would go.

So, bit by bit, I've been working on the transition. It's a lot like working a jigsaw puzzle that has somehow collected pieces of another jigsaw puzzle: most of the pieces need to stay, but it takes a lot of sorting to figure out what we need and what we don't.

And so last week, as sleep eluded me, I lay in bed visualizing the room, trying to determine what could go where and, perhaps more important, what could go. This curious combination of zooming in on an image I had to recall actually helped me to arrive at a solution. Somewhere in the midst of this process, I fell asleep, but when I woke up, I was excited to get started.

maklay62 via Pixabay

There's still work to do. One pivotal piece -- a lateral file cabinet I'm attached to -- has to stay put until my dad relocates and can re-claim it. But, in the meantime, I've not only figured out where its contents will go, but also set up the systems that will hold them. Now, bit by bit, I can move things from Point A to Point B.

Eventually, the furniture will fit the room, and the room will have a new personality. In the meantime, I'll keep dreaming up new ideas.