September14
rearrange
I am getting the distinct feeling that you want me to bore you with my house woes. Great! Here I go!
When we bought our house 5 years ago, our plan was to stay in it for 5 years. So, we bought a house that suited us at the time. We had two kids aged 4 (Jack) and 7 (Josie) half the time and we didn’t know where Travis would be working (he was a stay-at-home dad for 7 years up until we got married). So, we just bought the coolest house we could afford. We didn’t put all that much thought into it and we certainly didn’t do what my friend Liz did; she made a motherfucking RUBRIC.
Anyway, due to all kinds of complicated developments (housing market, J and J’s mom’s location, etc) we are probably going to stay in this house. Thing is – now we have 4 kids of vastly different ages (5 months, 3.5, 9 and 12) and the stupidest floor plan ever to exist. We have three bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs (a 1/2 story). The master bed and bath on the main floor, and then one bedroom and a bathroom in the basement.
The setup right now is this: All of the kids’ rooms are upstairs. My room is the master. Travis’s is the basement. (No, we don’t share a room – that’s a good post I’ll save for another day. Yes, we have sex.) Jack and Josie are here every other week and sleep upstairs. Zoe and Junie both sleep in my bed all the time. It BLOWS. I’m a hard-core bed-sharer with my babies, but I am NOT at all into this bed-sharing with a 3.5 year old who wakes up at 3am and orders me to sing her songs so she can get back to sleep. Fuck no, homes. Get in your own bed.
Thing is – her bedroom is upstairs! ON A DIFFERENT FLOOR. A.) there is no way I’m making trips up and down stairs in the middle of the night and B.) I don’t really want her to have to do that, either and C.) I don’t think it’s fair to ask her to move from my bed to a different floor.
So what’s the solution? We went rounds about this but finally decided to move Josie to the basement, Travis to the master, me to Josie’s upstairs bedroom and Zoe into her own room. Jack stays where he is. Trav’s big hesitation was giving Josie (12) too much privacy. But I argued that we’re slowly giving her more and more independence and we’re going to put her in a car AS THE DRIVER in three short years. Also, I want her to want to be here and having two younger sisters all up in her biz might suck as she gets older. Plus – this way she can spend 45 minutes in the bathroom at a go and no one will know the difference.
What do you think? Would you be comfortable moving your 12 year old to a basement bedroom? Or would you be comfortable having your small kids on a different floor than a parent?
I’m wondering about the person that came up with this idea of a main-floor master. I feel like maybe it was a parent of teenagers or an old fogie who didn’t want to climb stairs. Or a terrorist.
I met my hubbby 9 years ago just after he bought the house we live in. Our plan was to stay approx. 5 years and move before we started a fam since the house is COMPLETELY un-kid-friendly. Raise the curtains on scene 1 of “Why the hell are we still here” and you know where you’ll find us…ugh. When I was a kid, my sis and I lived in a SUPER creaky, dark old farmhouse with my grandparents. They had the “master” on the main and sis and I slept upstairs with my sis. I went through a phase in pre-school-ish time where I had nightmares and would go downstairs in the dark and sleep under my Grammy’s side of the bed because I wanted her with me, but didn’t want to wake her. One time I rolled around in my sleep and ended up under Grampy’s side of the bed. When he woke in the morning to go to the bathroom *I* discovered that he slept in the God-damn nude! AWKWARD! I never slept in their room again. LOL! But maybe it’s because we never knew anything else, but my sis and I didn’t mind being on a separate floor, even in that cold, drafty, dark old house. My hubby grew up having a basement bedroom away from the rest of his fam, starting at age 6, and always loved it. J seems about the right age to be given some independence and privacy, and the bonus of saving the rest of the fam from waiting in bathroom lines while a teenage girl fritters away an hour in the John is probably a huge bonus.
I’d have no problem putting the 12 year old in the basement. As a 12 year old I would have BEGGED to be given my own basement. And, if it cuts down on the midnight toddler request karoke sessions, then it definitely sounds like a good idea to me.