A change is as good as a holiday.

A few weeks ago, whilst staring dejectedly at the piles of stuff I still have sitting around the house with no permanent home since we turned our study/office into a bedroom, it suddenly occurred to me that just because a room is labelled "lounge room" on the house plan, it doesn't mean it has to actually be used as a lounge room.

And now you're all going "Well, der", but in my defence, when you've had rooms all set up for particular functions for 9 years (floor finishes, curtains, paint etc), it isn't immediately obvious to just change their use :-)

So, with some trepidation, I casually suggested to hubby one Saturday afternoon that perhaps - you know, if we had nothing better to do - we (meaning mostly he) could swap the entire contents of the two front rooms of our house with the entire contents of the two back rooms of the house!

Fortunately, he agreed that my cunning plan was actually a good idea and we spent the rest of the weekend dragging furniture, books & toys from one end of the house to the other. Phew! It all came together really well though and now our 'new' lounge room can take better advantage of the cool summer evening breezes, I no longer have a formal dining room that all visitors refused to sit in (because they wanted to be in the kitchen talking to me at the breakfast bar) and I've created an area where I can do my sewing and craft in the same space as my kids are playing! Awesome. And, as an added bonus, in the move I freed up a whole wall for future storage!




Now, everyone who knows me well (hi Mum!), knows that I am NOT known for my patience; as a classic Gen X-er I want things now, thankyouverymuch, so idea of waiting for a suitably large storage unit to arrive into one of our local second hand stores (or be listed on eBay), was - I'll admit it - kinda excruciating. Especially when I still have those aforementioned boxes still sitting around waiting for a home.

But, as every good thrifter knows, you never find what you are after unless you aren't actually looking for it. I tried using this reverse-logic the past few weekends, casually dropping into op-shops and second hand furniture stores with the premise of looking for tea cups for Miss Seven's birthday party, but anything vaguely suitable in the storage furniture line was already sold.

Unusually, I have the car today (and no kids) so I used the opportunity to take a load of clothing and toys to my local clothing-only Salvos store, but they weren't accepting donations today so I decided on a whim to drive to the next closest store and drop it all off, with the actual intention of looking for more tea cups.

You know where this is going don't you?

Yup, the Salvos store I went to also had furniture, and ta da! There they were - two huge timber cupboards! Squeeee!





Not only that, but they had a very lovely fit-but-retired couple who do deliveries for them, heading out to my suburb right then.

Ah, serendipity indeed.

Now I'm about to give them a once over with some beeswax furniture polish, line the shelves with some op-shop fabric and then load them up with my fabric stash and our craft supplies! Yay. My hope is that by having all this potential permanently on display in the kids' main play area, they'll be inspired to get creative every day (and therefore less likely to want to watch TV).

Now, where's that polish?

P.S. Do you like my new banner photo? I snapped it yesterday :-)

Cheers,