Sensitive Viewers May Want to Cover Their Eyes

I have for you today the "before" pictures of Will's room. They may not be appropriate for everyone. Viewer discretion is advised.



This view (above) is the corner of Will's room known as the "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here" corridor. Please begin shrieking now. (Also: note the closet doors. They are supposed to be white, but we ran out of steam when painting Will's room two years ago. My solution? I think we should take off the doors and forget about painting. Will never closes the doors, anyway, so why bother with them?)



This is Will's bed. Note the various bits and pieces of his wardrobe scattered across it. Mostly these are items I've picked out for him for school the next day that he's rejected in favor of his lacrosse shorts and one of his endless University of North Carolina tee shirts. Also note Will's wall decor. I rue the day we bought him a subscription to Sports Illustrated for Kids. Two minutes after it hits the mailbox, Will has cut out his favorite pictures and pasted them to the wall.

He also, by the way, has glued Lego to the wall. I have to say, it actually looks really cool.



Will's desk. Will's archeological dig of a desk. The fun part is when you get down to the layer of half-eaten candy stuck to the table top. I love that part.

So this weekend, we--meaning I--made big changes. I don't have pictures yet, because there's still a little bit of cleaning to do. But in the meantime, I thought I'd offer a tutorial for how one goes about preparing a room such as this for rearranging.

The first thing you do is go back to bed, pull the blankets over your head, and weep for the life you might be living in Paris as a wine-swilling, clove cigarette-smoking bohemian poet, had you played your cards right.

Next, you drag yourself into your child's room, pick up the clothes on the floor, clean and dirty, and throw them all into the hamper. Then you refold all the unworn school clothes and put them back into their drawer, where they will sit unmolested for the rest of the school year. Next you make the bed and you pile on top of it all the shoe boxes and binders filled with baseball cards. That clears a lot of floor space.

Then you get out the broom and start sweeping.

Yep, that's the only way to clean Will's room. You sweep all the Lego and art supplies and wiffle balls and superbouncy rubber balls and marbles and party favors into two or three piles. Then you pour yourself a good, stiff drink (or at least seriously wish you were the sort of person who could drink a good, stiff drink without falling asleep within ten minutes of imbibing) and start picking stuff out of the piles. You make new piles, one for crayons and markers and pencils, one for Lego, one for random baseball cards, and one for little plastic things you don't know what to do with, and a pile for trash.

This process takes approximately two to three years.

Then you put the art supplies in the art supply bucket, the Lego in the Lego bucket, and seriously consider burning the baseball cards before putting them in a designated shoebox. Finally, you spend five minutes rationalizing about how much you do for the environment by recycling and hanging the laundry on the line before throwing all those little plastic things into the trash.

And then you go back to bed and weep a little more.

I'll post the pictures of the makeover in the next day or so. I need to get back in there and do the last little bits. But I have to say, it's really fabulous, and Will loves his table and his new arrangement. He's hanging out in it all the time, like it's his apartment. Really, if we'd just put a mini-fridge, a computer and a TV up there, he wouldn't need us at all.

And that's why we don't.