by Cathy
We are a family of four, living it up city style. That means, we have a two-bedroom condo in a six-unit building in a bustling, trendy neighborhood in Chicago. Although we looooove our neighborhood and our place is more spacious than your average two-bedroom condo, we're kinda bustin' out at the seams.
First off, we have two girls. Girls have a lot of stuff. And since one is still a young seven year-old and the other is on the brink of teenageapalooza, the stuff varies from dollhouses, zillions of stuffed animals, coloring books, legos and Barbie/American Girl accessory overload, to an unGodly number of scarves, purses, shoes, makeup, hair products, hair accessories, techy gadgets and...clothes. My God, the clothes. They are simply. Everywhere.
Our condo goes through a sort of rebirth every few years or so, which is
imperative if humans are to live there. I've purged, reorganized, rearranged, redesigned, remodeled, rethought, recycled, reused, stored and purged again all of the stuff we've accumulated over the course of the 16 years we've lived there.
About a month ago, a teenage cousin of Joe's flew in from Mexico and will be our houseguest for six months, which spacewise, translates into half a century. A whole different type of flurry ensued in the two weeks I had to prepare for this. I desperately stacked stuff into Leaning Towers of Pisa on the shelves of my closets, based on the urging of my husband to "Use the space going up!!" So dangerously high are these stacks of blankets, sheets, sleeping bags, comforters, pillows, duvets and bedspreads, that one strong breath or slight nudging of a hanger below them, will send the entire cotton/polyester blend of a mass tumbling down upon us, whereby we will literally be suffocated by stuff.
Since our guest is sleeping on a pull-out sofa in the living room, the front hallway closet, where we normally keep all of our outerwear, has now been assigned as his closet. This means, there is no rhyme or reason to where any of the former contents are stored; each one-fourth of our coats, sweaters and jackets are respectively downstairs in storage, in my bedroom closet, on the kitchen/mudroom coat hooks and a portion still stuffed into the corners of the original closet he is now using.
That closet was also being used to store my handbags. Behold, now, their temporary storage space:
Why, yes. That is the toy chest in my girls' bedroom you're lookin' at there. I have become that mom who tells their kids that handbags are more important than wads of stuffed animals. But have no fear, they aren't going without; we still have clusters of cuddly thingamabobs dangling from the rafters in their room, piled high on their beds and crammed into their closet, so as priority would have it, the plush critters from the toy chest are tucked in our basement storage space for now....or...for EVER.
No, it's not fun finding the space within an already confined space but it really is fun having a houseguest through which we get to experience the great city of Chicago as tourists all over again and whom the girls can hang out, chat and play with as the older brother they never had. And bonus! Joe and I get a built-in babysitter for some much needed time out of the house.
Now, if we could only find our jackets...
(*For more clown car fun that is our lives, check out Patti's "Clown Car Purse" post!)
