We live in an old house, so it is no surprise that the floor plan is a bit hard to work with. The living area is great and I’m happy with it. The bedrooms are rather interesting. With young children, I like to be able to sleep near enough that I can hear them in the night. It took us a while to figure out how to do that. Here is the current arrangement:

The main floor has pretty much stayed the same since we moved in. We used a bedroom off the front room for a playroom, and I love having it there.

When we first moved in, we used the downstairs family room as a master bedroom, with the kids in the bedroom one. Bedroom three is very small and was unfinished, so it became our closet. The attic room was our school room, where I set up all our school activities and other toys. It worked, but the family room just didn’t make a very good bedroom.

The downstairs family room was converted to the school room, where it remains. We moved the master bedroom upstairs to the attic room. It was a lovely bedroom but had several fatal flaws. Attics get hot in the summer. The nearest bathroom was down a flight of steep stairs (and I became pregnant). We were also two flights of stairs from our kids. Although they generally slept through the night, we still used a baby monitor and occasionally had to go down two flights to comfort a child.

Now, the master bedroom is in bedroom one. We moved the boys to bedroom two, and have been working on finishing up bedroom number three for a nursery when the new baby comes. It is not perfect. All of the bedrooms downstairs are pretty tiny, but it works. Eventually when the kids are older they will probably move up to the attic room and have more space. (The room is currently a guest room and place to put everything that doesn’t have anywhere else to go. It isn’t used much.)

We ended up moving a lot of furniture in the process. I’m glad my husband has put up with all my requests to occasionally move a large bed up or down two flights of stairs.