The Forgotten Room That Now Has a Purpose

Our new house has 4 bedrooms.  One of those bedrooms belongs to my mother-in-law and is on her side of the house.  One more bedroom is our master bedroom upstairs.  Another one we use as a guest room.  And the other one…well, we kind of forgot about it for a while.  It’s in the front of the house right off of the formal living room and at the bottom of the stairs.  It shares a hallway with my mother-in-law’s door to her portion of the house.

We weren’t exactly sure what we were going to do with the room.  We thought about using it as an office.  But we didn’t really need an office, because we have a built in desk upstairs in our room.  We thought about making it a second guest room, but I decided that I didn’t really want more than one set of guests at a time ha ha.  We tossed around the idea of making it a gym, but then thought it might be nicer to have our exercise equipment in the sunroom.

Well….it WAS nice, but at the same time it wasn’t.  We spend LOADS of time in our sunroom.  More than I ever imagined.  And the bulky treadmill and exercise bike took up a good portion of it and just looked….ugly.  And…we weren’t using them. 

So, I started clearing out the front bedroom.  It had a bunch of miscellaneous totes.  I unpacked them.  There are two closets in there.  One of them we use to store our luggage.  The other one my mother-in-law uses for storage.  I tidied both of them up.  There was also a futon in there, which got moved out as well. 

I first stacked the 3 trunks to use as a TV stand of sorts.  Then I moved the exercise bike and my husband moved the treadmill in there.  I added our few weights, exercise DVDs, blew up the balance balls, etc.

And now we have a little home gym! 

I like that the ugly gym equipment is all together now in a room that we can shut the door.  We don’t have cable in there, but we have a TV and eventually will have a DVD player (we have an extra one, but it’s whereabouts are in question at the moment) for exercise DVDs.  And the location is great too…if my mother-in-law wants to use it it’s not like she has to go through the rest of the house to get to it.  She’s much closer to it than we are!

And it really opened up our sunroom.  We moved the futon out there and my mother-in-law’s outdoor rocking chair (she wanted it protected from the weather).

So it’s another project I can cross of my list.  I’m just so glad that that room has a purpose now.  I hated that it was a storage room for a while and just couldn’t deal with it being a storage room long-term. 

Now we just have to actually use it!