A Lesson from College I Should've Remembered

One of the biggest hurdles facing families who have more children than the acceptable norm in our current culture is space. Finding family cars that can actually fit a family, or homes that have enough room for everyone is far more prohibitive than health care, food, clothing, or education (not that those are necessarily walks in the park, mind you).

But I'm not trying to rant about that kind of thing, for now anyway.

Case in point: we have 3 boys in one bedroom. And I have to give them credit, for the most part they get along pretty well. But there's just precious little room for their stuff. Even ignoring their pack-rat tendencies, 3 boys tend to accumulate lots of stuff. But it's hard to ignore those tendencies when you can't even get 60% of their dresser drawers closed.^*

So we're generally looking for ways to try to maximize use of our space--we have storage containers of all sizes, shuffle belongings, strategically "lose" ignored toys when they're not looking, etc. So a couple of weeks ago, when TLomL came home with a bright idea, we jumped on it. A loft bed--essentially, a bunk bed without a bottom bunk.

I assembled it this morning. Mercifully--and inexplicably--I didn't injure myself in the process. Then I threw together a couple of pre-fab bookcases (I love, love how many books these kids have--and want). I cannot believe how much floorspace this has created. Even more I can't believe it took us this long to come up with the idea! Arnold's days away from his 6^th birthday. We really should've done this as soon as he moved into a "big boy" bed.

I feel exceptionally stupid in this regard because one of the first things that any residence hall resident at the UI learned was the importance of the loft bed for fitting in a decent dorm fridge/stereo/television. I had one for 3 years, and fully intended on building one for one more as soon as I found the initiative/$$. So why did it take me so long here?


^* should note we're working on curbing/directing those tendencies